AbiWord Weekly News (6/08/2000)

The road goes ever on and on . . . (JRR Tolkien)

Development News

This week saw significant progress in several areas, with a total of 37 new patches going into the tree, from 11 different developers. Congratulations to our two new developers, Mike and Michael.

Two very large patches went into the tree this week. Joaquin improved the Goto dialog , making it modeless. Martin also improved opon it. This is the end of the POW from October 3 of last year (the oldest currently outstanding).

The other large commit was the change by Jamie Montgomerie to use libOLE2 in the Word importer. This should open the way to an extremely useful Word exporter as well. Unfortunately, this change broke both the BeOS and FreeBSD builds - fixes are actively being worked on.

Among other changes, the most significant was Jesper's new implementation of findPointCoords, which fixed a number of tricky bugs and wins patch prize of the week. Enjoy the $299. Michael Pritchett also fixed up the build system on the Cygwin platform, in several patches. Aaron fixed a number of problem in the ruler code, although more keep springing up. Mike Meyer, a new contributor, fixed problems in the font code. Additionally, Dixie made a number of improvements to the English help. Finally, a large number of other bugs were fixed by many contributors.

On the L10N front, Martin Hansen, a returning contributor, added some Danish updates, and linus@centrumstr.se fixed a few problems in the Swedish translation.

On The List

This week was one of the busiest the list has yet seen with a total of 248 messages posted. Significant topics included

1. Use of the STL - Continuing in his quest to be inflammatory, this week Sam proposed using the C++ Standard Template Library. This generated lots of heat, and at least some light, although consensus has not yet been reached.
2. Word Import Changes - Jamie's changes to the Word importer were the cause of much traffic this week, as people worked hard to fix the build problems they caused.
3. FreeBSD Port - The status of the FreeBSD port was discussed, and people expressed the hope that an owner could be found for it.
4. Font Support - Mike Meyer posted a question about using DOS fonts on the Unix AbiWord, and suggested a patch to improve the situation. After some discussion, and a number of patch versions, the patch went in.
5. findPointCoords - Jesper posted a new patch to fix the problems in this function, in which Sam found a few problems. After these were fixed, there was some discussion of what to do when the app crashes.
6. Zero-Length Runs - Paul (welcome back) posted a detailed proposal for killing several birds in the Run code with one stone, including the final step of Show Paragraphs. This generated some discussion, and hopefully some implementation.
7. The BeOS port - In addition to breaking on the new Word import changes, the BeOS port has been having other problems, which are currently holding back 0.7.10. Sadly, this port has not been updated in some time, and needs a maintainer.
8. Overwrite Mode - A question was asked about overwrite mode, which led to debate about what should go in the Preferences dialog.

Bugzilla Status

Currently, Bugzilla lists 195 bugs outstanding, with 13 of those still in SUBMIT state. Last week, we closed 37 bugs, many of which were fixes, and 17 new bugs were opened.

Other News

This week's cool post award goes to Paul, for his "modest proposal" for fixing several run problems, and enabling the last bit of Show Paragraphs.

Sam TH
sytobinh@uchicago.edu