Development News

This was the slowest week for development since the beginning of the AbiWord Weekly News. Only five patches were checked in, from four developers. There were no new developers this week.

This week’s only big patch was from Bruce, who implemented the Tabs dialog on Windows, and updated the Unix and XP versions to be compatible. Unfortunately, this dialog proved to be rather buggy, as is to be expected with such new code. Bruce also fixed a problem with the Zoom selector on the Win32 toolbar.

The major reason for the lack of apparent development was the hopefully imminent release of 0.7.11, whose cause was helped by a few patches for BeOS from Stephane. Problems appear to currently on BeOS and Solaris.

Another reason for the slowness of development this week was an extended outage of the abisource.com website, caused by some careless work with a backhoe in the vicinity of the SourceGear offices.

Hubert provided some more patches this week to bring the Mac OS X build closer to successful compilation. It’s not there yet, but it is making progress.

Finally, Marco Innocenti updated the Italian translation.

On The List

This week, we wrapped up another month, and saw 66 messages posted on abiword-dev. Significant topics included:

1. 0.7.11 Status - Various compiler errors continued to be posted, and considered, this week. Problems on Be popped up, and were hopefully also fixed.
2. Bad Publicity for AbiWord - Jim Colvin pointed out an article which roundly criticized AbiWord as terribly unstable, and stated that distributions should warn people about it. [Ed: AbiWord almost never loses my data, but years of working with Word do still cause me to save all the time.]
3. Equation Editor - Martin posted a long, off-list discussion he had had about an equation editor for AbiWord with the author of a standalone one. this then generated some discussion, with much of it centering around MathML, and Bonobo possibilites.
4. Quality of AbiWord Development - James Brown posted a strongly worded criticism of AbiWord development based on non-response to several of his querys about spell checking. Several people responded, mostly to say that the lack of response was based mostly on us not knowing the answer.

Bugzilla Status

Currently, Bugzilla lists 231 bugs outstanding, with 32 of those still in SUBMIT state.

Other News

Other News

This week, the cool patch goes to Bruce Pearson, for his implementation of the Tabs dialog on Win32. The cool post award goes to Martin, for his work in trying to bring us an equation editor.