AbiWord Weekly News (5/10/2000)

Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work we go . . .

Development News

It was a busy time for development this week, with a total of 31 new patches going into the tree. We also gained two new contributors. Congratulations to Hubert and Matt.

The most significant patches this week came for Thomas, who added Insert Symbol on QNX, allowed QNX package format distribution, cleaned up the About, Zoom, Options and Paragraphs dialogs, as well as numerous other improvements for our QNX port. With all of the work that Thomas has put into making AbiWord the most cross-platform word processor around, it should come as no surprise that he has won the Patch Prize for this week. Congratulations and $299.99 for Thomas.

You wouldn't think that Mike Nordell was a new contributor this week for all the work he has done, but he really is. He took advantage of his new commit access to add 21(!) patches this week, ranging from focus problems to memory management errors to printing problems.

This week's other major contributor also got his name in the CREDITS for the first time. Hubert Figuiere fixed bugs 837, 843 and 569 in areas ranging from PostScript to Rich Text Format.

On The List

List traffic picked up a good bit this week, with 174 messages on the abiword-dev list. Lots of diverse topics were reviewed, including

1. Help File Translation - Pierre Abbat and Ash put in lots of effort to get Chris Caron's French help system translated into English, and with only one week under their belt, they are almost finished.

2. Code Guidelines - Mike Nordell posted some questions about coding style, C++ compilers, and our C++ standards, which led to lots of discussion on each point, and a useful table illustrating the capabilities of the various compilers we use.

3. Focus issues - This was brought up on several threads, and we seem to have made progress toward squashing this bug on both Windows and Unix.

4. Printing POW - Mike Nordell and Alan De Smet worked together to knock off the most recent POW, dealing with Windows printing alignment.

5. Cut and Paste in X - A few bugs in our clipboard implementation under X Windows were brought up, and the general ugliness of the X clipboard metaphor was commented upon.

6. Bug Fixing - This week, bugs 443, 528, 215 and 596 received lots of discussion, leading to progress on all fronts.

7. QNX Improvement - Thanks to Thomas Fletcher's hard work, AbiWord on everyone's favorite soon-to-be-free OS, QNX/Neutrino/Photon has reached feature parity with the other platforms.

Bugzilla Status

Currently, Bugzilla lists 200 bugs outstanding, with 16 of those still in SUBMIT state. Last week, we closed 29 bugs, 12 of which were fixes, and 11 new bugs were opened.

Other News

This week's cool post award goes to Mike Nordell, for his comments on the often-overlooked topic of coding standards.

Also this week, Sam TH put up an archive of pending patches. If you want the bloodiest edge, check them out.

Sam TH
sytobinh@uchicago.edu