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AbiWord Weekly News #61, (2001, week 37, released 2001.10.02)
Welcome to issue 61 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
Perl scripting support on Windows, FriBiDi support, new RTF filter feature, new developers (yeah!) and the 0.9.4 release freeze called for. Lots of bugs fixed this week too, and some work on (IMO) crucial module and dynamic menu infrastructure. The only bad thing to say about this week, is that the number of QA bugs are climbing again. Please help us get some of these closed. See further down for details.
Note that Top 10 Bugs and Milestone Bugs are from 2001.09.25 and not from week 37.
Seeing as we're now in the 0.9.x cycle, I'd like to (yet again) ask people (users, developers, lurkers - the whole shebang) to go to the bug list in BugZilla and cast your votes for bugs you'd like to see fixed. The present list of priorities has not really changed for a long time (other than the bugs on it that have been nailed recently). This is your chance to voice your (personal) direction of the bug fixing effort! See below for details...
In this issue:
Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov
CVS Stats
| 2001.09.08 - 2001.09.14 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| tomas_f | 68 | FriBiDi support, pilcrow fixes, utf-8 locale fixes, and some endnote fixes. |
| dom | 67 | New import/export dialogs, some exporter fixes, fix ttftool for FreeBSD, module/plugins work, some dynamic menu changes (from Joaquin), fixed a Unix keyboard bug, handle 1 more font attribute in XHTML importer, ut_worker class added and fixed bug 1850. |
| msevior | 34 | RTF exporter fixes (with David Mandelin), fix a prefs bug, fix a wrapper bug, HTML exporter fix (partly from John), RTF stylesheet import fixes (with Matti Picus), style change crasher fix, and style backend changes. |
| hub | 30 | RTF importer fixes and stylesheet support (from Matti Picus), build and compile fixes, HTML exporter fix, and some web updates. |
| aiken | 18 | Thesaurus work. |
| mpritchett | 11 | Localization fixes (from Dom), ability to load modules in Windows, Windows uninstaller fix, Windows List Dialog bug fixed, and Windows path fix (from John Anderson). |
| rms | 5 | Portuguese string update. |
| dchart | 1 | 0.9.4 release notes |
Project Of the Week
POW (Project Of the Week) and the new uPOW (User Project Of the Week) is an attempt at attracting new developers and entice help from users by lowering the bar of entry to doing something constructive for AbiWord. A POW will describe a goal and often outline how to get there.
Presently we have a few unclaimed POWs. Please see the POW status page for more details.
| Type | POW | Summary |
| POW | 2001.22 | Sorting contents of combo boxes, and splash screen preference option |
| POW | 2001.18 | ImageMagick multipurpose graphic importer |
| uPOW | 2001.17 | Where to send AbiWord announcements |
| uPOW | 2001.09 | Determining Locale Status |
| uPOW | 2001.07 | Host for AbiWord BugDay |
| uPOW | 2001.06 | Update Feature and UI matrices |
| POW | 2001.05 | Bug-buddy support for AbiWord |
| POW | 1999.47 | Make translated dialogs fit |
| uPOW | 1999.37 | CS folks wanted... |
Bug Update
Here's the AbiWord bug update for the last week. If you can spare some time, please help us triage the bugs - you don't need to be able to program to do this.
Bug Counts
These are the bug counts for the past 4 weeks:
Date: Submitted: QA: Open: ---------------------------------------------------- 2001.08.24 94 ( -16%) 125 ( +5%) 363 ( +10%) 2001.08.31 94 ( +0%) 158 ( +26%) 354 ( -2%) 2001.09.07 123 ( +30%) 145 ( -8%) 352 ( +0%) 2001.09.14 127 ( +3%) 171 ( +17%) 349 ( +0%)
Bug Votes
As a user of AbiWord, you are able to vote on bugs you'd like to see closed. The process is quite simple:
Create yourself an account if you don't already have one.
Bring up the bug list.
Click on Bug IDs to read bug details.
If you find an interesting bug you'd like to have fixed, cast your vote by clicking on the "Vote for this bug" link on the bug description page.
You have 30 voting points you can cast in whatever proportions you'd like on anything between 1 and 30 bugs. But note that developers will likely prioritize a bug with 30 single votes than a bug with a single 30-unit vote. So vote with lower unit counts (5 or so) to make your voice heard!
From the sorted list of votes, we found the current Top 10 Bugs to be:
| ID | Votes | Milestone | Summary |
| 1276 | Table support | ||
| 1410 | Please add .doc Microsoft Word Save As file type in future releases | ||
| 1030 | Font substitution table | ||
| 1016 | PDF output would be nice | ||
| 1545 | Help only works for localizations en-US es-ES fr-FR | ||
| 376 | File assosciate problems for all file types with Win32Slurp | ||
| 1243 | undo after a paste command causes crash | ||
| 1418 | File/Page Setup box hangs on using OK to exit | ||
| 1505 | It would be nice if the menu strings were dynamically loadable | ||
| 1747 | background colour of text selection is always grey |
Target Milestones
We have just started nominating bugs for the next two big releases. You, developer and user, can have your say on which bugs to nominate by casting your vote on bugs as described above. The current milestone distribution is as follows:
| Milestone | Bug count |
| Without Nomination | 261 |
| 0.9.x | 41 |
| 1.0 | 94 |
| future | 85 |
Closed Bugs
Note that there are many many bugs just waiting for QA before they can be closed. Please help!
In the past week, the following 4 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed and verified fixed):
On the Mailing List
Traffic on the developer mailing list has settled on about 200 postings per week.
You may also find interesting threads on the user and documentation lists (unfortunately the archive for the latter is broken at the moment).
This week, interesting topics on the developer list included:
RTF Importer/Exporter: Matti Picus asked what features were missing from the RTF filters. With help from Martin (and others) he started working on style support in the importer. This was checked in later in the week.
imagemagick graphics importing: Don Bright posted a patch for doing image imports via an imagemagick filter. Parts of this was checked in, others are pending some cleanups in AbiWord which Dom decided to do (I think).
NSIS installer rocks: Tim LaDuca let the developers (Michael in particular :) know that the new Windows installer rocks. Let me tell you, dear user, developers love to get nice mails like this one. Does wonders for morale.
Was there a 0.9.3 release?: Good question. The answer is yes, but it was never announced (outside of the mailing list that is).
Dynamic Menus: Jared Davis asked Joaquin for help with dynamic menus - and got it. For your information, dynamic menus are needed to make plugin modules work - when you plug in something like the thesaurus module, it needs to add menus so you can access its functionality. And module plugins are something we want to keep AbiWord mean and lean, providing a variety of (customizable) features to different end users. Good stuff!
bidi question: Tomas Frydrych has been working on replacing the existing proprietary BiDi (that's bi-directional, as in writing right-to-left as well as left-to-right) algorithm with FriBidi. He asked a few questions about integration, and later in the day checked in the code.
abiword 0.9.4 Tuesday - Melbourne time next: Martin called for the 0.9.4 code freeze.