AbiWord Weekly News #55, (2001, week 31, released 2001.08.06)

Welcome to issue 55 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

Yup, 0.9.0 was released. And there was much rejoicing (and waving of little flags).

We don't let that stop us though - development continues. The plan is for frequent 0.9.x releases over the coming weeks. Stay tuned for those announcements...

In this issue:

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

Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov

CVS Stats

Patch of the week goes to Martin for his section break cleanup. I'll be sure to go over it sometime and try to break it - lots of subtleties in that code :)

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:
----------------------------------------------------
2001.07.13   86 (  +7%)    139 ( -16%)   310 (  +2%)
2001.07.20   77 ( -10%)     87 ( -37%)   321 (  +3%)
2001.07.27   68 ( -11%)    108 ( +24%)   318 (  +0%)
2001.08.03   87 ( +27%)    118 (  +9%)   316 (  +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

Note that there are many many bugs just waiting for QA before they can be closed. Please help!

In the past week, the following 7 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed and verified fixed):

911, 1324, 1584, 1761, 1785, 1786 and 1805

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. TrueType fonts in AbiWord: Part Deux: Tim pointed out a small problem with the instructions for using TT fonts with AbiWord - but was rather happy that it actually does work and looks good both on screen and on paper.

2. WordPerfect Importer: William Lachance posted first version of his WordPerfect importer. He later asked for French and German WP documents in order to add international support to the importer.

3. Release: 0.9.0: Dom finally announced that the release of AbiWord 0.9.0 has gone gold.

4. Commit: HTML exporter work: Obviously, the 0.9.0 announcement was generated by exporting HTML from AbiWord. Unfortunately, it appeared to break a certain standards-impaired browser, so Dom had to tweak the output a little to make it cope better. Not surprisingly, not everybody liked this very much.

5. Embedding AbiWord: David Mandelin asked how to go about embedding AbiWord.