Portable AbiWord

Greetings all,

I wanted to take a minute to introduce myself. My name is John T.
Haller and I'm the developer behind several portable versions of open
source apps like Portable Firefox and Portable OpenOffice.org. As some
of you may know, I've also packaged AbiWord for portable use. You can
learn more about that effort here:
http://portableapps.com/apps/office/word_processors/portable_abiword

For the unfamiliar, the following modifications are made to a standard
AbiWord install to make it portable:

- All EXEs and DLLs (except Abi_IEG_Win32Native.dll) are compressed
using UPX with the options --best --compress-icons=0 --nrv2d
--crp-ms=999999 -k This shrinks AbiWord's size from 18.6MB to 14.2MB.

- A launcher (or wrapper) called PortableAbiWord.exe is added that sets
a fake USERPROFILE environment variable before calling AbiWord.exe.
This points AbiWord to the portable device to store its settings, making
it portable.

Other than that, it's a standard install of AbiWord from the installer
pulled directly from the Program Files\AbiWord directory. No code is
changed. Nothing is recompiled. The project has been pretty popular
and has had about 16,000 downloads since it was introduced. I've
actually been able to introduce quite a few people to AbiWord as a result.

While downloading the latest release and packaging it, I noticed the
Trademark policies on the AbiSource website, notably the AbiWord vs
AbiWord Personal nomenclature. I had originally named the project as
Portable AbiWord to both keep it consistant with the other portable
projects and to make clear that it was based on a standard release. I
look at the word portable as more descriptive in this case (since it's
AbiWord made portable).

That said, I wanted to make sure I wasn't stepping on any toes in the
AbiWord world as that's the last thing I'd want to do. If Personal is a
prefered indication of a different compilation, then Portable AbiWord
should be ok. But if it is being used to denote offical vs
unofficial... and if Portable AbiWord is more unofficial in your eyes...
I can alter the name to fit the prefered naming convention. (Portable
AbiWord Personal would be one possibility)

I've got the 2.4.2 release packaged and ready for release, but wanted to
get some opinions on it before I do, so I can get a name change or other
issue taken care of before I do the release as this release, made from
the new PortableApps.com website, will likely be more popular than the
previous ones. Also, I'm working with the U3 folks on a few apps for
their new platform (Firefox and OpenOffice.org so far) and may be able
to sell them on a package of AbiWord for it as well.

That's about it for me. I'll be on the dev list as I have been for a
while if folks want to respond on-list. You can also drop me a note
directly.

Regards,
John
Received on Tue Jan 10 04:43:28 2006