From: Dom Lachowicz (domlachowicz@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Apr 23 2003 - 16:33:55 EDT
> know if that's correct.)), and tried to open
> documents she made in Abiword
> format before the update, they came out with odd
> squares at the end of most
> lines, which could not be removed and had various
> other problems. This,
Pragmatically, I believe that this is fixed in 1.0.5
and in the recent 1.9.0 nightly builds
(abiword.pchasm.org). 1.0.6 will also be out shortly.
> The real problem here is not the technical problem,
> nor even her unwillingness
> to update, but the fact that both she and I, after
> looking pretty hard for
> quite a while, could not find out how to resolve
> this problem of updating. The
> "Check for Updates" item on the help menu is broken
> and results in incorrect
> and contradictory info; the list of versions on the
> website is not clear and
> seems contradictory(although this could be fixed
> with some explanation of
> stable and development releases), and there is
> generally insufficient
> explanation of how to identify if a bug has been
> fixed, and what a non-
> technical user could do about it.
Right, so we have a small number of people working on
this project. The homepage is always up to date
(www.abisource.com) and the download site is always
good too (www.sf.net/projects/abiword). We try our
best on the other pages, but a lot of times, that
isn't good enough. For future reference, the newest
versions can always be downloaded from those 2 sites
and are always announced there. As for your other
issues, I'd suggest filing bugs in bugzilla on these
topics.
Finally, abiword.pchasm.org has a "nightly downloader"
so that you can update your nightly (unstable) builds,
ehrm, nightly if you so wish. The caveat is that these
are our development/testing builds, so you're likely
to run into more troubles than it's worth at the
moment. But it's also worth mentioning.
> Regarding using Bugzilla to check if a bug has been
> fixed, my mother, when she
> started using Abiword, was expecting and hopping to
> use Bugzilla for this
> purpose(as well as filing bugs in it.:-), but has
> not been able to do so (at
> least, not without considerable help from me.) She
> is not sure exactly why
> this is so, but she says it feels "technically
> oriented, not for infrequent
> use." Possibly one of the various front-ends might
> help.
Bugzilla is supposed to be at least a little
technical, but I can see the complaint that it is
perhaps "too technical" for the casual user. For those
types of situations, there's a "show all open bugs"
link on the front page (bugzilla.abisource.com) and
then you can skim/scan through the bug titles for
things relating to your particular bug (or use the
"find" dialog or type-ahead-find in mozilla/phoenix).
If you find a bug that you're interested in, click on
the link, and add your email to the "CC:" list. You'll
be notified whenever something changes in that
particular bug.
As for the technicality of bugzilla, there are reasons
for the madness. We want people to register so that we
have an established means of communication with the
reporter, so that we can contact for more information
or documents. Also, this is there to weed out the lazy
folks, "noise", spam, and duplicates. It's there to
make our lives easier at the expense of a little
temporary inconvenience to the user.
Sure, we could probably put up a better front-end to
bugzilla. But we do a lot already -
Product detection
Platform detection
OS detection
Attempted version detection
And have sane values set for a lot of the other
entries (priority, milestone, ...). Again, we're a
small team. If you're interested in helping us put up
a better front-end to bugzilla, I urge you to get in
touch with Hubert Figuiere.
If you get some spare time, I recommend that you read
the bug policies and my bugzilla rant
(www.abisource.com/~dom/bugpolicy.html). We definitely
want to help you and your mother out as best we can.
Unfortunately for you and your mother, I value my time
spent fixing a bug more than I value your mother's
time spent filing it. Good, technical bugreports ==
less time I spend weeding through bad bugs and less
time spent fixing any pariticular bug.
> Sorry for the rant; I know that all of you have
> done, and are doing, a lot of
> wonderful work for free, and aside from the problems
> addressed above, Abiword
> works great. (I use it quite happily.) I, and my
> mother, are grateful for all
> the work you have done, and offer these issues as
> help to allow you to be
> aware, and hopefully improve, Abiword.
> And if there is anything I can do to help, please
> let me know.
Thanks for the detailed email, and best of luck to you
and your mother.
Cheers,
Dom
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