Development News

This week continued to be busy, with 43 new patches, from 17 different developers, going into the tree. We have 5 new contribtors this week. Congratulations to Göran, Christopher, Karl, David and Allen.

This week's most significant patch was David Schmitter's online help, which provides access to our HTML help files from within AbiWord. This fixes the POW from June 21, the last outstanding POW. For this work, and for adding a feature needed for 1.0, David wins this week's $299 Patch Prize.

Also this week, Joaquin made several improvements in AbiWord toolbar handling. The toolbars have now been divided into several parts, and can be turned on or off individually. He also made several improvements to the GNOME toolbars. These changes allowed Martin to add new buttons for starting and stopping different kinds of lists.

The BeOS build made significant progess this week, as Christopher Plymire implemented both the Word Count and Insert Date and Time dialogs, as well as providing several build fixes for Be.

Thomas also made lots of progress on the QNX port, adding the Goto dialog and the Show/Hide Toolbars option.

Finally, lots of translations were updated this week, including Italian, Spanish and both varieties of Norwegian.

On The List

This week was again busy, on both abiword-dev and abiword-user, with 207 messsages on the former and 55 on the latter (potentially a record for abiword-user). Significant topics included:

1. Smart Quotes - A large number of threads on this topic developed this week, including discussion on an algorithm, i18n of Smart Quotes, and other discussion.

2. Gnome-XML - A new developer (Göran) proposed the use of libxml, which is used by the GNOME project. He also posted a patch to do this (code speaks louder than words). There was some discussion, leading most people to think that this was a good idea.

3. Autoconf - Göran also suggested using Autoconf to get more reliable builds. This also generated discussion, but not much code.

4. Toolbar buttons - With Joaquin's new toolbar work, space opened up for additional buttons. So naturally, there was discussion as to which buttons were appropriate.

5. librsvg - Leonard Rosenthal suggested we use librsvg (by Raph Levien) for rendering SVG images. People liked this solution, but details remain to be worked out.

6. Gettext - Joaquin suggested using gettext, rather than our own home-grown system, for string translation. Several people liked this idea, but no one was prepared to write the code.

7. Staroffice goes GPL - James Lindenschmidt wondered what the implications of Sun's announcemnt about StarOffice would be for AbiWord, which led to long discusion, including several people who wanted to see us not become like StarOffice.

8. SDI vs MDI - There was a debate on abiword-user on the merits of opening multiple windows for multiple documents vs opening only one.

Bugzilla Status

Currently, Bugzilla lists 198 bugs outstanding, with 18 of those still in SUBMIT state. Last week, we closed 4 bugs, 3 of which were fixes, and 1 new bug was opened.

Other News

This week's cool post award goes to Bill Carpenter, for his well-thought-out algorithm for choosing Smart Quotes.

Sam TH
sam@uchicago.edu