Subject: Re: Upcoming releases
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Mar 12 2001 - 12:47:28 CST
> - what features do *you* want to implement for this release?
> - what other features would be nice to have?
I'm working on Normal, Web, and Print Layout views right now. Who knows if
they will be fully-functional by the next release, but they'll be hiding
behind some DEBUG statements until then.
>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
I intentionally removed the Border and shading dialog from non-debug builds.
It's there if someone wants to do it, but I don't consider it 1.0 critical
and probably more work than it is worth. The rest *need* to get done
(reasonably well) before 0.9.0. We can still fix bugs and tie up loose ends
and such.
>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.
See my above comment.
>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.
I can wholly sympathize with this opinion. I'd like to have as many features
that "Just Work" as possible. If I (or anyone else for that matter) is to
agree with your above statement, Paul (as I think that we should), we need
to lay out exactly what we consider "Just Working" for each feature in
question and what the acceptable +/- for each is.
>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.
I am of the same opinion. I am going to continue to work on wv on its
separate release schedule, as always. I will always be syncing Abi's version
with the official repository. I think that over the next few days I will
update our exporter so that once my wv routines work 100% correctly, we will
be able to export to DOC entirely for free. The wvExporter API is almost
frozen right now. It's simple, but it's a first cut and I'm relatively sure
that we can do a lot with it. Until then, the exporter will stay hidden
behind a DEBUG statement. My progress has been hindered since no one else
has expressed an interest in helping out ;-(
>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.)
Several tons of work, actually. We will most certainly be lossy for certain
operations.
>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.
We'll see about this. It really depends on how much work I get done and how
satisfied we are with the results. Can we just agree to say that we'll
re-evalute this a little further down the road?
Dom
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