AbiWord Weekly News (4/5/2000)

1. Development News

Since the last time this periodical was issued, the AbiWord Bonsai tree gained a total of 15 new patches. Although only one new entry has been made to CREDITS, he turned out a large quantity of patches. Congratulations to John.

The biggest patch this week was from Jamie Montgomerie, who got in his patch to knock off the first step in the Word exporter. This sparked lots of discussion on the best way to continue this development, and led to a few patches by Justin to fix a few problems in the importer.

The other big development this week was that John Tunison, a new developer this week, added GNOME versions of all the missing dialogs. This included Font, Paragraph, Options and About, and improvements to Word Count.

Additionally, Alexey Sinutin added everyone's favorite feature, overwrite. Alexey also added a patch to keep the splash screen off the taskbar. Smaller changes included Martin Sevior's fixes for bug 776, and for correct cursor motion. Paul also added "sticky" setting for view mode options. Finally, the build on IRIX was fixed, courtesy of that most wonderful of bug reports, those with attached patches.

As for L10N, Henrik updated the Swedish translation, and Marco Innocenti update the Italian version.

2. On The List

This was another busy week for AbiWord development, with 134 messages on the abiword-dev list. The major topics of discussion were:

1. Libpng - The bug, which no one seems to have tracked down yet, prevents us from using later versions of libpng. This appears to be the most serious bug currently outstanding, and is a blocker for 0.7.9.
2. GNOME support - Spurred by John's admirable effort, a number of questions relating to GNOME support have come up, with only some being resolved. However, our GNOME support does continue to improve.
3. Libole2 - As our word exporter makes progress, we need several new libraries, some of which are not available on all our many target platforms. How to port them is an important decision.
4. Encodings - Although we aren't there yet, AbiWord developers around the world are working to give us support for languages that do not use the Latin alphabet.
5. Glib - As an offshoot of the discussion of the libole2 discussion, we ruminated on the various ways of getting Glib support onto all our topic platforms.
6. Focus - With each passing week, we come close to the not so holy grail of the modeless dialog, and with it, proper focus support.

3. Bugzilla Status

Currently, Bugzilla lists 192 bugs outstanding, with 13 of those still in SUBMIT state. Last week, we closed 25 bugs, and 8 new bugs were opened. Keep those quality bug reports coming in.

4. Other News

This week's cool patch award goes to John Tunison, for his two patches to bring the GNOME port up to speed. And in his first week, too.

This week's cool post award goes to Jeff, for as good an explanation of the piece table as you could want.

5. March Wrap-up

Though we didn't have the same publicity as last month, March was still exciting for AbiWord development.

• We greatly improved our GNOME support, so that it is now on par with the other ports.
• We ZAPPED 3 of our outstanding Projects of the Week, and made progress on several more.
• We began a Word exporter, which, when finished, will greatly help our interoperability.
• There was lots of traffic on the list. The most traffic was generated by Paul, who posted an astonishing 142 times.
• There was also lots of development, with 63 different patches.

Sam TH
sytobinh@uchicago.edu