AbiWord Weekly News #63, (2001, week 39, released 2001.10.02)

Welcome to issue 63 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

This week AbiWord 0.9.4 was tagged and we finally got some bugs QA'd and closed. AbiWord also got the ability to import WMF vector graphics and T602 wordprocessor documents. On the whole, not a bad week.

Seeing as we're now in the 0.9.x cycle, I'd like to (yet again) ask people (users, developers, lurkers - the whole shebang) to go to the bug list in BugZilla and cast your votes for bugs you'd like to see fixed. The present list of priorities has not really changed for a long time (other than the bugs on it that have been nailed recently). This is your chance to voice your (personal) direction of the bug fixing effort! See below for details...

In this issue:

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

Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov

CVS Stats

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:
----------------------------------------------------
2001.09.07  123 ( +30%)    145 (  -8%)   352 (  +0%)
2001.09.14  127 (  +3%)    171 ( +17%)   349 (  +0%)
2001.09.21  134 (  +5%)    189 ( +10%)   346 (  +0%)
2001.09.28  143 (  +6%)    169 ( -10%)   345 (  +0%)

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 30 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed and verified):

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. Announce: T602 importer: Petr Tomasek announced the availability of a T602 importer.

2. Thesaurus Plugin Status: Jared Davis reported on the current status of the thesaurus plugin. It's almost ready for prime time. Good stuff!

3. release-0-9-4 tagged: Yes, what we have all been waiting for. Many other threads followed on availability of binaries, testing results, etc.

4. New Splash Screen?: Dom presented a new splash screen drawn by Jakub Steiner. Resulted in a long thread mainly about people missing Abi the Ant :) I'm not sure what the outcome is - Dom said he'd ask Jakub to try and merge Abi in somehow. We'll see...

5. Announce: CVS Access: Three new developers (Frank J. Franklin, Matti Picus and David Mandelin) were given CVS write access. Dom followed up with The Rules of Access.

6. Web Site Redesign: Jared Davis (again?) announced his nice user friendly web site designed primarily for users. It's at http://abiword.aiksaurus.com/.

7. Release Strategy: Jared also posted a standardized release strategy. There were no followups though.