Re: Help needed from Abiword developers

On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 21:57, Wookey wrote:
> Hi people, As I think I posted to this list earlier - we are using Abiword
> in a new ARM-based device with an 800x600 touchscreen. It's aimed at
> 'average' users, so we're doing a lot of UI work to make things as
> idiot-proof as possible, and familiar to people who normally use Windows
> all day.
>
> Things are going quite well, but we have a number of showstopper bugs in
> Abiword which we haven't got enough resource to fix.
>
> We need help from you guys. Anyone who has some significant time to do some
> debugging on the following over the next week or two would be eligible for
> real folding cash in exchange :-)
>
> These are the most egregious bugs we've currently got:
>
> 1) Speed. Abiword scrolls very slowly. Is there anything that can be done
> to improve this? If you hold down a cursor key to get to a particular line
> abi can then spend another 20 seocnds scrolling miles past where you wanted
> to get to. Some changes to make it throw away extra cursor keys it doesn't
> have time to deal with whilst scrolling would be a huge improvement.
>

I've noticed perf issues here on my opteron, and I have a few...not
fixes, but adjustments that help a little bit. I'll try to take a look
at what can and cant be committed for you in the next few days.

> 4) The first character after each space in a new document creates a new
> document. (after about 10 words abi tends to crash if you persist in typing
> new words). This is a fairly crazy bug, and is presumably arm-specific.
>

Something-specific in any case. Someone else mentioned this bug a
couple days ago, but I might be thinking of you on irc.

> So, that gives some idea of the things that aren't working - there are
> plenty more :-)
>

I know filing a whole lot of bugs can be a pita, but we're very
forgetful over here in AbiWorld.

> Is anyone able to help, or suggest possible reasons or debuging routes for
> any of the above? (We should be able to get a backtrace for 3 in GDB with a
> suitable build).
>

Yeah, get you some bts when possible, and if I dont follow up on the
perf thing by the end of the week, pester me a bit.

Regards
-MG
Received on Sat Aug 14 07:09:26 2004