AbiWord Weekly News #85, (2002, week 13, released 2002.04.01)

Welcome to issue 85 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

Continued Bug hunting, yet another feature, and plans for a 0.99.4 release next week.

If you want to help with the QA process during the 0.99.x cycle, you can find nightly builds for Windows here: http://abiword.pchasm.org/ and less frequent (but more stable builds) here: http://www.niksbiks.dk/Abi/. For Linux/GNOME you can find nightly builds here: http://pinohuis.dhs.org/uwog/abiword/. Thanks!

In this issue:

• CVS Stats
• Project of the Week
• Bug Update
• Latest Releases
• On the Mailing List
• Special Interest

Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov

CVS Stats

Project Of the Week

POW (Project Of the Week) and the new uPOW (User Project Of the Week) is an attempt at attracting new developers and entice help from users by lowering the bar of entry to doing something constructive for AbiWord. A POW will describe a goal and often outline how to get there.

Presently we have a few unclaimed POWs. Please see the POW status page for more details.

Bug Update

Here's the AbiWord bug update for the last week. If you can spare some time, please help us triage the bugs - you don't need to be able to program to do this.

Bug Counts

These are the bug counts for the past 4 weeks:

Date:       Submitted:     QA:           Open:
----------------------------------------------------
2002.03.11  142 ( -12%)     86 ( -46%)   394 (  +1%)
2002.03.18  155 (  +9%)     96 ( +11%)   388 (  -1%)
2002.03.25  164 (  +5%)     81 ( -15%)   397 (  +2%)
2002.04.01  132 ( -19%)    102 ( +25%)   401 (  +1%)

Bug Votes

As a user of AbiWord, you are able to vote on bugs you'd like to see closed. The process is quite simple:

1. Create yourself an account if you don't already have one.

2. Bring up the bug list.

3. Click on Bug IDs to read bug details.

4. If you find an interesting bug you'd like to have fixed, cast your vote by clicking on the "Vote for this bug" link on the bug description page.

You have 30 voting points that can be cast in units of 1 to 30. But please only use votes in 5, 10, or 15-unit blocks (on a single Bug) and avoid casting votes on Bugs you have reported yourself.

From the sorted list of votes, we found the current Top 10 Bugs to be:

And the Top 10 Requests For Enhancements to be:

Target Milestones

We are nominating bugs for the next two big releases. Users as well as developers, can have their say on which bugs to nominate by casting votes on bugs as described above. The current milestone distribution is as follows:

Closed Bugs

Note that there are many many bugs just waiting for QA before they can be closed. Please help!

In the past week, the following 33 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed (FIXED/WORKSFORME) and verified). Note that the links have labels, so you can get a summary by moving the pointer over them (if your browser supports this).

915, 1074, 1133, 1783, 1852, 1855, 1857, 1888, 1938, 2082, 2205, 2378, 2505, 2585, 2615, 2632, 2652, 2680, 2704, 2721, 2756, 2789, 2827, 2851, 2859, 2877, 2915, 2935, 2955, 2982, 2984, 2990, 3000,

Latest Releases

Here are links to the latest official releases of AbiWord for various architectures and operating systems. There are also links to the latest snapshot builds of AbiWord for a subset of the architectures/operating systems.

Note that the snapshot builds may not work (at all!), but are likely to include more features and have fewer bugs than (older) official releases. Use the official releases for "production systems" and the snapshot builds for testing and when you want to help with Bug triaging.

• AbiWord 0.99.3 - Release Notes

  • MacOSX (PPC/dmg.gz):

  • Linux/GNOME (PPC/DEB):

  • Linux/GTK (PPC/DEB):

  • Linux/GNOME (i386/RPM):

  • Linux/GNOME BiDi (i386/RPM):

  • Linux/GNOME Sources (SRPM):

  • Linux/GTK (i386/RPM):

  • Linux/GTK BiDi (i386/RPM):

  • Linux/GTK Sources (SRPM):

  • Clipart (i386/RPM):

  • Fonts (i386/RPM):

  • Win32 (i386/EXE):

  • Win32 BiDi (i386/EXE):

  • Source (all/tgz):

• AbiWord 0.99.2 - Release Notes

  • AbiWord 0.99.1 - Release Notes

    • AbiWord 0.9.6 - Release Notes

      • AbiWord 0.9.5 - Release Notes

        • AbiWord 0.9.4 - Release Notes

          • Linux/GTK (i386/DEB):

        • AbiWord Snapshots

          • Linux/GNOME (i386/RPM): Provided by Marc Maurer. These are updated daily. Plugins, clip art, fonts and help files are available too.

          • Win32 (i386/exe): Provided by Jeremy Davis. These are updated twice a day. Plugins are available too.

          • Win32 (i386/exe): Provided by Nikolaj Brandt Jensen. These are updated about once a week. BiDi builds are available too.

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        On the Mailing List

        Traffic on the developer mailing list has settled on about 200 postings per week.

        You may also find interesting threads on the user and documentation lists (unfortunately the archive for the latter is broken at the moment).

        This week, interesting topics on the developer list included:

        1. Various QNX Patches.: Johan Bjork has started bringing the QNX up to par. Nice!

        2. 0.99.4 Release attempt: Hub posted a message declaring the intend to release a 0.99.4 AbiWord before 1.0. The tree was tagged later in the week as planned, but later had to be retagged due a bad bug. We should see the release announced next week.

        3. Fwd: Re: Link Grammar (fwd): Another old(er) subject is that of the licensing problem of using the Link Grammer engine. Seems that will be resolved by a change in license. Very nice!

        4. Commit: ImageMagick plugin: Not to be outdone by Martin's AbiGimp plugin last week, Dom added effect filter support to the ImageMagick plugin. I'm starting to wonder if we'll need a new Plugin of The Week award :)

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        Special Interest --

        From time to time, this section will contain essay-style text about various special interests of the AbiWord development.