AbiWord Weekly News #90, (2002, week 18, released 2002.05.06)

Welcome to issue 90 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

It finally appears to have happened: we have Win32 binaries of AbiWord 1.0.1! The AbiWord 1.0.1 release will be announced officially later this week.

This week BugZilla was updated (or rather reverted) to a pristine BugZilla version, changing the Bug states available. The reason was to allow easier upgrades of our BugZilla installation which was a bit behind the times. Unfortunately, this means that all Bugs have been "touched" this week, preventing my scripts from finding closed Bugs. So only a short list of closed Bugs this week (or rather, VERIFIED Bugs).

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.

Verified Bugs

In the past week, the following Bugs have been verified as fixed. The listed Bugs have all been put in RESOLVED mode as either FIXED or WORKSFORME and have then been verified by the people listed below. Other causes of resolving 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.

These are links to snapshot builds of AbiWord for a subset of the supported 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.

On the Mailing List

Traffic on the developer mailing list has settled at about 200-400 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. RFP: use gnu gettext: Dom thought it was about time we switched to gettext. There are some issues to resolve, but there are also some nice benefits, such as a reduced memory footprint (with the present localization system, the AbiWord executable contains all the strings for all the locales). The discussion continued in this thread.

2. RFP: design document: Dom asked for a summary of last weeks voluminous discussions on l10n/i18n changes. Tomas posted a nice summary.

3. commit - fix test script: I checked in some fixes to a small perl script that should allow us to start writing small AbiWord tests, including regression tests, which should be run daily. The first stab at a framework is there, now we only need the tests...

4. plugins in main tree? (was Re: branch tonight): There were some open/unclear issues of where the plugins should live in the new tree. Paul argues that they should live in a separate tree (as they already did before). This thread settled the issue, and later many of the existing importer/exporter modules were moved from the main AbiWord source tree to the plugin tree.

5. Switching to a new Bugzilla: I've been fed up with the BugZilla we've been using, so I finally sat down and hacked the updater script to allow us to move our existing BugZilla data (which is using different states than the main stream BugZilla) to a pristine BugZilla 2.12. Hub helped, and he's also promised to update to the latest BugZilla (which is way less painful now).

6. Release 1.0.1: Hub tagged the tree for 1.0.1, and after branching, bumped the version of the trunk to 1.1. This opened the door for non-bug fix changes.

7. Next Generation Layout document: Martin posted the latest design of the of the next generation layout engine.

8. 32-bit UT_UCSChar: Tomas started converting AbiWord internals to use 32-bit UCS characters. He later checked in the changes.

9. Re: commit: abi: Gabriel's dictionary hash downloader: Gabriel Gerhardsson implemented this very nice new feature.

10. Abiword in (unhacked) Evolution.: Martin has made AbiWord work as a plugin in Evolution (there's a screenshot of this). Very nice!

11. Press Release. Translators please read!: Martin's looking for translators to help translate the AbiWord 1.0 release announcement into different languages for maximum effect.

Special Interest --

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