Re: OpenDocument annoyance list - reward?

Hello! Sorry for replying a bit late folks. This will be a long reply
mail...

Le lundi 27 novembre 2006 à 19:37 +0000, Alan Horkan a écrit :
> You might find your fellow students cheaper than other developers, a few
> beers or a good meal go a long way. If you are really lucky you might get
> a developer genuinely interested in Abiword and get them to develop for
> their own benefit.

Well, if I had coders around me I guess I would already have tried that,
but, sadly, I'm in "human science" (not sure it is called that way in
English), and I'm mostly one of the very few FOSS advocates out there
(raised some awareness when I had the chances through oral
presentations), there are no programmers near me :(

> You may not be a programmer but being a developer is not always about
> programming. If you are patient and determined you can do a lot of
> things. Detailed tests that show specific problems and explain how they
> might be fixed can make it much easier for a developer to come along and
> just fix the problem, unlike many bugs where developers must spend a whole
> lot of time figuring out what is the real problem. Very carefully sample
> documents can be extremely useful too.

Yeah, that's what I'm currently doing providing samples and things like
that, I wanted to know if I could make things move a tiny bit faster
(though that sounds really arrogant, and that's not what I want to
mean).

http://tinyurl.com/y9leut
> It might help to highlight which 3-5 of those many bugs you consider most
> important to you. You did already mention image cropping for example.

Ok, well here goes, I did not want to clog up the list with a "wishlist"
but I guess those bugzilla search results are actually a bit
overwhelming. I just realized that the link I provided initially was
wrong (kind of) because it only filtered for bugs that were reported by
me and skipped a few others that I was interested in, totalling 29
(argh. sorry.), http://tinyurl.com/yah89r

In order of "annoyingness" (to sound Flickerish), the top 13 bugs (I had
a hard time limiting myself to those). Those near the top are the most
determining ones.

PRIMARY OBJECTIVES: affecting compatibility/stability/usability
9852 "missing" feature: basic image cropping handling
10029 automatic column breaks for wrapping
10085 opening multiple documents resets user preferences
9865 add aspect ratio locking when holding the shift key - pre...
9451 Font defaults to "Times New Roman" even when it is not installed
8825 Image size bound to page margins
9860 nested tables are imported differently depending on file ...

SECONDARY OBJECTIVES: ease of use
1235 Not possible to change zoom and font size on toolbar using...
9774 list indenting grab one excessive line
10018 the home key should bring the cursor after the bullet item
1510 Missing localization of smart quotes
10060 images with accents cannot be dragged and dropped into do...
9862 double clicking images locks them instead of bringing up ...
9851 recent document list in the file menu should be trimmed

Of course, if you feel like a bug-hunting Rambo you can always ask for
bonus missions, I have plenty ;)

[be right back after these two replies]

Le samedi 25 novembre 2006 à 22:10 +1100, Martin a écrit :
> Having said that, one us, sum1, was employed over the Google Summer of
> code period and devoted a lot of work to improving the odt and other
> import/export filters. I believe he still does.

I'm really happy to hear that :)

> OLPC is not particularly interested in ODF at least for the time being.

Huh, now I'm a bit surprised, but oh well... I know getting abiword to
work on Sugar is getting priority right now (and I understand that).

> Those are a particularly interesting collection of bugs. I'll do my best
> to work my through them as I find time.

Thanks for your concern :) as you may have seen in the upper part of
this mail however, not all of them are "critical" (trimmed about 16 of
them).

Le samedi 25 novembre 2006 à 12:25 +0100, Robert Staudinger a écrit :
> To my knowledge we have no information about another SoC opportunity
> yet. 100% compatibility is impossible to achieve anyways, because
> abiword doesn't support a good deal of the more esoteric OpenWriter
> features.

Yeah, I'm aware of the fact that Abiword lacks specific features that
hinder format compatibility indirectly, sadly. The most "visible" ones
in my files are on the top of my "must kill" list in the first part of
this email. Of course these are certainly not the only ones (I think, if
I remember correctly, Abiword lacks columns that are of different
widths), but those are the ones that I use very often.

> OLPC is built around yet another document format called Crossmark.
> Interest to support that has been expressed by prominent abiword
> developers.

I ready very briefly bits of the specification, that sounds interesting
to say the least, kinda like a wiki format that could be parsed by a
load of applications? I like the idea.

[back to Alan's reply]
> an easier way to barter for services might be to buy a DVD or book,
> or even a donation to Gnome or as we approach christmas some
> deserving charity.

So if someone is willing to hunt down a good chunk of those bugs as a
Christmas gift (in exchange for some other Christmas gift, I guess a
book or DVD or something along those lines would fit my budget :), I
guess that could work too ~ just don't ask for a PS3 ;)
Received on Wed Nov 29 01:30:33 2006