Subject: Re: Upcoming releases
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Mon Mar 12 2001 - 12:05:58 CST
At 10:53 PM 3/12/01 +1100, Martin Sevior wrote:
>Well if we manage to get a Styles Dialog / Word Export and Headers/footers
>working by then I suggest the Early April release should be V0.90.
>
>Whether or not the Lists dialog is ready is less important since we
>already have a working Dialog.
>
>So my vote for critical path for V0.90 are:
>
>Styles Dialog
>Word Export
>Headers/Footers Dialog.
>
>Do people want to adjust their priorities to get these going by then?
I'm really, really happy to see advance discussion of this next release. So
much so, that I'd like to ask *everyone* who's actively contributing these
days to throw their $.02 into the mix as follows:
- what features do *you* want to implement for this release?
- what other features would be nice to have?
If you skim the s_TellNotImplemented() messages, you'll see that we have a
total of five (5) chunks of the UI which still need some significant work:
- Tabs dialog
- View Headers and Footers
- Lists dialog
- Border and shading dialog
- Styles dialog
Of these, borders and shading and tabs both seem to have fallen off the
radar horizon. Is anyone interested in either tackling these or writing up
the necessary POWs? If not, then we should make an explicit decision that
it's OK to ship 0.9 and 1.0 without them.
I personally have always preferred to have fewer features that Just Work,
rather than a bunch of features that half-work, so I'll probably be one of
the more conservative voices on specific features.
Specifically, I'm wary of sneaking Word export into 0.9 unless we expect a
very long pre-1.0 release cycle to iron out any and all glitches that could
surface. People's expectations that they can round-trip their Word
documents to & from AbiWord without *any* loss of data or functionality will
be very, very high.
Thanks to several years work on wv, we already have excellent Word import
support, but there are still plenty of potential gotchas that'll really
start showing up as soon as we start round-tripping documents. For example,
I can easily envision problems like:
- lossy styles
- mismatched default templates
- incompatible fields and/or lists
- etc.
and I haven't even tried to export anything yet! (This isn't a slam at Dom
or anyone else -- there's just a ton of work to be done here.)
I know that Word export is an ultra-cool feature to add to the bullet list
of features we support, but I don't want our marketing to get ahead of the
reality. This is a lot of work, and at the moment I suspect it may be more
prudent to ship 1.0 without the feature at all.
Paul
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