AbiWord Weekly News #98, (2002, week 26, released 2002.07.01)

Welcome to issue 98 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

This week has been fairly slow with documentation and Bug QA sharing the Activity Price Of The Week(tm) (David and Mark - go go go!). Maybe people are busy working their day jobs, basking about in the sun, or maybe they're just low on hacker juice. Hopefully activity will pick up again in some weeks after the summer vacation.

BugZilla is now opening Bugs in the UNCONFIRMED state again, but there's still a lot of unconfirmed Bugs in the NEW state so the graph continues to look like we're drowning in confirmed Bugs. We are, of course, but it's not quite as bad as the graph suggests. I don't expect things to level out for another 3-6 months though.

In this issue:

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

Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov

CVS Stats

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. note on vertical scripts support in AW: Tomas had a comment on support of vertical scripts in AbiWord - essentially that it won't happen until we can use Pango to render, which is probably in the V3+ time frame.

2. Please share your AbiWord success story!: I ask every user out there to consider adding a small success story (or just a line saying Thank You) to the Success Stories page. The developers need some emotional support (this one does, anyway).

3. Announcement: Availability of preliminary Study about document format: Martin Konold posted a message about a new study on document formats. Unfortunately, the text is only available in German, but it's a nice initiative. I don't know if anyone from the AbiWord camp has joined the discussion though.

4. Xft vs. old font stuff: Joaquín is getting ready to commit his new Unix font support.

Special Interest --

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