Date of 2.2 release.

Hi Folks,
          I've been busy with other things recently so number of commits
I've made to AbiWord has dropped off. I expect that I will have
more time after GUADEC to get stuck into things again. I think I
will have a fair bit of time after GUADEC and until August 31st
to work on AbiWord.

I feel that we need more direction and to find some way to balance
bugginess versus shipping issues. AbiWord-2.1.3 has significantly new and
better features in many ways than 2.0 so at some point we have to decide
that we have fixed enough bugs in the HEAD series to release it.

One very significant change this year as opposed to last year when we
released 2.0 is the much improved QA team we now have. You guys rock!

The upshot of this great QA team is we now have lots more high quality bug
reports than we had last year at our 2.0 release.

OK so the big question: What's the schedule?

Well this is hard because I don't know how hard it will be to fix some of
the bugs we have. I also don't know how many people will work on fixing
them. I do know I don't want to wait too long for a 2.2 release.

There are some absolute killer bugs that must be fixed before 2.2.

There are:

1. Slowness of typing on OSX.
2. No TOC dialog on OSX
3. No Stylist dialog on OSX.
4. No Fold Text dialog on OSX.
5. No TOC dialog in windows
6. No Fold Text dialog on windows.

IMHO these are cirtical for 2.2. We won't release until these are in place.

I'll leave these for Hub, Mikey and Michael Pritchett.

In addition:

It would be really nice to be able to import Text Boxes from MS Word for 2.2.

There are 4 outstanding feature requests that I'm seriously considering
for 2.2.

These are:

a. Make text boxes default to position relative to column (rather than
paragraph which is what we do now.)
b. Implement sum rows/columns in tables (one day to implement at most.)
c. Implement Text to tables (two days to implement at most)
d. Implement Sort table rows/columns (Maybe two days maybe longer)

I feel confident I can implement b,c,d plus fix a large fraction of the
table/TOC/text box/ other XP bugs by August 31.

I *might* be able to import text boxes from MS Word by then. I suspect
that we have much of what need already in wv and ie_imp_MSWord_97 but
until the whole issue is understood it's really hard to put a time-line on
this.

I'm less confident me being able to fix Revision Marks/Version History
bugs by August 31st.

I hope that Tomas Frydrych will have time to work on them before then.

So the upshot of this is that I think we can seriously aim for a 2.2
release on August 31st. I feel confident we will have a wonderful program
that we can all be proud of by then. I'm certain that we will still have
bugs on August 31st but there is a good chance they will be small enough
that we can live with them.

What do people think?

Cheers,

Martin
Received on Sun Jun 20 05:58:56 2004