AbiWord Weekly News #86, (2002, week 14, released 2002.04.08)

Welcome to issue 86 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

AbiWord version 0.99.4 didn't make it, but instead 0.99.5 is now pending for release some time next week. Except for Martin hunting down (and fixing) more RTF problems and phearbear plugging away at the QNX support, last week was pretty slow due to many of the developers attending GUADEC.

This week I've given the AbiWord Weekly News format a big overhaul. I've made the various tables look more consistent, included extra Bug data (the old Top 10s have been replaced by Top 20s and the list of Closed Bugs is more verbose so you can more easily get an overview of the progress). I've also included a new graph for the Bug counts covering the last year, replacing the old one-month 4-samples text block.

Also note that this week there's a sharp drop in Open Bugs. This is because I've started excluding RFE Bugs which are not representing, strictly speaking, failures in AbiWord. This is a step towards getting the number of Submitted Bugs down, since I see a tendency of RFE Bugs being left in Submitted state, probably to avoid them bloating the Bug counts. It shouldn't be an issue: if you don't want to include RFE Bugs in your queries, simply exclude them (type "rfe" into the Keywords field and select "None of the listed keywords set").

Finally, there's now a list of the most active QA helpers - doing Bugzilla work is not very visible (dosn't show up in CVS nor the mailing list archive), so I figured it was time some kudos were extended to the fine folk helping us there.

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 a programmer to do this.

Bug Statistics

Bug Votes

These are the week's Top 20 Bugs in the categories problems and requests for enhancements. Influence next week's results by casting your own votes.

Closed Bugs

In the past week, the following Bugs have been closed. The listed Bugs have all been put in QA TO VERIFY mode as either FIXED or WORKSFORME and have been verified by the people listed below. Other causes of closing a Bug (e.g. as INVALID) are not tracked since they usually do not represent a fixed problem.

To get your name in neon, help QA the Bugs. If you want your name rather than your email address to appear, drop me a line.

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.

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. [slashdot] Should Open Source Software Expire?: Should we do one-off warning dialogs when an AbiWord binary is getting too old? Alan thinks so. I also think it would be a good idea - for all those people who don't realize AbiWord evolves at a scary rate :)

2. Release 0..9.5 tagged: The pending 0.99.4 release from last week was skipped, and instead the tree was tagged for a 0.99.5 release. It should go live next week (deja vu, anyone?)

3. Using DJGPP: James Jensen asked if it is possible to build AbiWord for Windows using DJGPP. Presently the answer is no, but many would be interested in AbiWord being able to build using free tools. Please help us get there!

Special Interest --

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