AbiWord Weekly News (4/19/2000)

Another Week in AbiWord Development . . .

Development News

While the AbiWord tree only saw 11 new patches this week, several significant advances were made. However, there were no new contributors this week, although several new people did propose patches.

Without question, the most significant patch this week was the Insert Symbol dialog, from Martin Sevior. Unfortunately, this patch was allowed to languish for too long before going into the tree, but it is truly an achievement. This dialog allows everyone to take advantage of the Unicode features of our XML file format. Just a few days after it went into the tree, Bruce finished the Win32 port of the dialog, allowing us to keep platform parity for the upcoming release of 0.7.9.

The other significant patch this week fixed the infamous libpng bug. This bug was tracked down by Sam, and fixed by Justin. The lesson: Libraries provide interfaces for a reason, and you ignore them at your peril.

Other patches this week include several dialog improvements for QNX from Thomas, who also added the options dialog for the platform he supports singlehandedly. He also added a new utility function, and fixed a few build problems.

On The List

This week, traffic picked up slightly on the list, with 96 messages posted to abiword-dev. Significant topics included:

1. Insert Symbol - This patch, committed this week, generated lots of discussion, on everything from bug reports to XP development to platform parity and the 0.7.9 release schedule.

2. Libpng - Sam did the detective work to find this bug, and then Justin looked through the libpng source to find what we actually should be doing.

3. Cooperation with KWord - KWord is the most significant open-source word processor besides AbiWord, and this week, Joaquin began an effort to improve (or begin) cooperation between the two efforts.

4. Page Numbering - A new volunteer offered to work on page numbering, leading to some discussion on numbering and the relation to fields.

5. LibOLE2 Progress - Jamie Montgomerie made further progress on the support for OLE2 in wv and our word importer. This led to an offer from Caolan for Jamie to take over the administration of wv in general.

6. Goto dialog - Joaquin completed another dialog, and offered the patches to prove it. This should sound the death knell for the POW from October 3, the oldest still open.

Bugzilla Status

Currently, Bugzilla lists 196 bugs outstanding, with 15 of those still in SUBMIT state. Last week, we closed 9 bugs, and 9 new bugs were opened. What a coincidence. Keep those quality bug reports coming in.

Other News

This week's cool patch award goes to Martin Sevior, for a very impressive Insert Symbol dialog.

This week's cool post was from Jeff (the second in three weeks), who gave an excellent explanation of the AbiWord XP development philosophy.

Sam TH
sytobinh@uchicago.edu