AbiWord Weekly News #46, (2001, week 22, released 2001.06.03)

Welcome to issue 46 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

It's been a very slow week, mainly due to a change of IP address of the AbiSource servers. Also, quite a few of the developers are probably bogged down preparing for (or taking) exams.

A few issues back there was talk of adding ClipArt support. This week Dom added the dialog for GNOME. Other platforms are expected to follow fairly soon.

This week, albeit slow, still saw an additional two very nice checkins: Martin went hunting for screen dirt and appears to have made quite a few kills, while Andrew (still without CVS access) added support for Windows IME input which should fix a few high-ranking bugs.

Finally, Dom has called for a new release within the next 2-3 weeks and asked for people to get into bug fixing mode. May I use this opportunity to point out that the bug counts have been pretty much unchanged for the past month now - we need users to help triage the 57 submitted bugs and do QA on the 91 QA-pending bugs. The developers need to look at the 287 Open bugs - at least some of these should have been fixed by the checkins in the past month. And of course, as Dom requested, developers should get cracking on those 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

Patch of the week goes to Martin for his screen dirt rampage. Not being able to manipulate glyphs on the screen without messing up is rather embarrassing for a WP.

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:
----------------------------------------------------
2001.05.11   48 ( +71%)     51 (  +4%)   295 (  +0%)
2001.05.18   50 (  +4%)     58 ( +13%)   306 (  +3%)
2001.05.25   55 ( +10%)     89 ( +53%)   287 (  -6%)
2001.06.01   57 (  +3%)     91 (  +2%)   287 (  +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:

On the Mailing List

Traffic on the developer mailing list has been really low this week, both because of the IP address change and because people have been spending time on schole and life in general. The threads are just mentioned by name (no links) because the mailing list archive isn't working properly. This week, interesting topics included:

1. UT_Pair car and cdr: Mike stumbled over some LISP terminology in a class and wanted it changed. A long flamewarish thread followed. Eventually car and cdr was changed to more acceptable names.

2. Cursor movement errors: Current page up/down behavior annoys some people because the cursor does not follow the display movement. This has come up before and a fix in the form of a preference is planned.

3. Add hyperlinks capability: Interesting thread about the ability to recognize hyperlinks in documents and allow the user to send these to a browser when clicked.

4. Release Soon: Dom would like to see a new release within the next 2-3 weeks and listed things that need fixing before then. Mostly dialog work and bugs related to newly introduced features.