AbiWord Weekly News #75, (2001, week 51, released 2002.01.13)

Welcome to issue 75 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

The Bug hunt has started; lots of fixed Bugs in this week, and also quite a few QAd/Closed. There's some feature improvements too (Word importer mainly), and David started converting the documentation to HTML.

Note that this issue is written much later than the week it covers: Bug voting information is from 2002.01.13, not week 51.

In this issue:

• CVS Stats
• Project of the Week
• Bug Update
• On the Mailing List

Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov

CVS Stats

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.

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:
----------------------------------------------------
2001.11.27  172 (  -2%)     69 ( -58%)   350 (  +7%)
2001.12.04  151 ( -12%)    112 ( +62%)   352 (  +0%)
2001.12.11  141 (  -6%)    141 ( +25%)   348 (  -1%)
2001.12.16  129 ( -12%)    118 ( -17%)   358 (  +5%)
2001.12.23  104 ( -19%)    101 ( -14%)   386 (  +7%)

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:

1. Create yourself an account if you don't already have one.

2. Bring up the bug list.

3. Click on Bug IDs to read bug details.

4. 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:

And the Top 10 Requests For Enhancements to be:

Target Milestones

We are nominating bugs for the next two big releases. Users as well as developers, can have their say on which bugs to nominate by casting votes on bugs as described above. The current milestone distribution is as follows:

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 61 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed (FIXED/WORKSFORME) and verified):

737, 804, 824, 867, 913, 970, 974, 977, 1112, 1286, 1289, 1302, 1365, 1506, 1726, 1853, 1859, 1881, 1936, 1964, 1968, 1970, 1980, 2015, 2041, 2068, 2069, 2079, 2085, 2090, 2104, 2122, 2144, 2153, 2167, 2168, 2173, 2188, 2189, 2211, 2216, 2224, 2228, 2277, 2281, 2298, 2311, 2327, 2355, 2367, 2375, 2382, 2388, 2399, 2401, 2423, 2434, 2435, 2436, 2443, 2445,

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:

1. Website 'Contribute' Section: As a followup to my expectations text (and comments to it), Jared asked for help to add a contribute help section on the web site. See this page for the outcome. If you have ideas for improvements, please post them on the user or developer lists.

2. language coordination proposal: Damon Allen Davison suggested coordinating localization to improve quality.

3. The Need For Standard Release Procedures: Jared re-posted his suggestion for a standard release procedure since he'd received no feedback on the initial posting.

4. AbiWord 0.9.6 'we love the internet' released: Martin announced the 0.9.6 release.

5. On the Road to version 1.0: Dom's plans for the 1.0 release. Resulting in a long thread.

6. Funding/Financial support for FreeSoftware: Damian Ivereigh posted a link to his draft proposal for coordinating funding for OS programs (and obviously AbiWord).

7. Interesting Statistics: Jared posted statistics on the browsers used to download AbiWord releases since October 24th 2001.

8. Plugins page: Jared announced the new plugins download page.

9. Solaris status: It appears Hubert has decided to do something about the Solaris support. If you happen to have spare Sun machine you're not using for anything, he could probably put it to good use - see his message :)

10. Help Styles: David Chart has started the work on making the documentation (written in AbiWord) available in HTML form.