AbiWord Weekly News #52, (2001, week 28, released 2001.07.16)

Welcome to issue 52 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

A massive amount of bugs have been closed this week, Martin has done more work on GNOME printing (and preview), and Dom's been pushing for a release tentatively set for July 20th. We'll see if it happens by then - it may still get postponed due to unresolved blocker bugs.

In this issue:

• CVS Stats
• Project of the Week
• Bug Update
• On the Mailing List

Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov

CVS Stats

No CVS commit summary this week since Bonsai has been disabled due to CVS lag problems.

Project Of the Week

POW (Project Of the Week) and the new uPOW (User Project Of the Week) is an attempt at attracting new developers and entice help from users by lowering the bar of entry to doing something constructive for AbiWord. A POW will describe a goal and often outline how to get there.

Presently we have a few unclaimed POWs. Please see the POW status page for more details.

Bug Update

Here's the AbiWord bug update for the last week. If you can spare some time, please help us triage the bugs - you don't need to be able to program to do this.

Bug Counts

These are the bug counts for the past 4 weeks:

Date:        Submitted:    QA:           Open:
----------------------------------------------------
2001.06.22   95 ( +41%)    144 (  +5%)   312 (  +3%)
2001.06.29   96 (  +1%)    165 ( +14%)   311 (  +0%)
2001.07.06   80 ( -16%)    167 (  +1%)   303 (  -2%)
2001.07.13   86 (  +7%)    139 ( -16%)   310 (  +2%)

Bug Votes

As a user of AbiWord, you are able to vote on bugs you'd like to see closed. The process is quite simple:

1. Create yourself an account if you don't already have one.

2. Bring up the bug list.

3. Click on Bug IDs to read bug details.

4. If you find an interesting bug you'd like to have fixed, cast your vote by clicking on the "Vote for this bug" link on the bug description page.

You have 30 voting points you can cast in whatever proportions you'd like on anything between 1 and 30 bugs. But note that developers will likely prioritize a bug with 30 single votes than a bug with a single 30-unit vote. So vote with lower unit counts (5 or so) to make your voice heard!

From the sorted list of votes, we found the current Top 10 Bugs to be:

Target Milestones

We have just started nominating bugs for the next two big releases. You, developer and user, can have your say on which bugs to nominate by casting your vote on bugs as described above. The current milestone distribution is as follows:

Closed Bugs

In the past week, the following 87 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed and verified fixed):

On the Mailing List

Traffic on the developer mailing list has settled on about 200 postings per week.

You may also find interesting threads on the user and documentation lists (unfortunately the archive for the latter is broken at the moment).

This week, interesting topics on the developer list included:

1. AbiSaurus v0.05: Jared Davis announced the avilability of a thesaurus package (English only, at this time) which can be used with AbiWord.

2. Release/Tree closing: Dom called for tree closure. But during the long thread that followed, quite a few blockers were identified. Which is probably what Dom was after - developement pace has been feverish since this posting :)

3. Before the release: Two days later, Dom followed up with a request for status reports on the various supported architectures and whether there'd be people to work on them for a release tentatively set for Friday the 20th of July. All hands on deck!