AbiWord Weekly News #47, (2001, week 23, released 2001.06.10)

Welcome to issue 47 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

It's been a slow week again (by AbiWord standards anyway) due to finals/exams. Martin has however been very active and has fixed more rendering problems and made some major improvements to the performance of AbiWord. This will make the next release of AbiWord the best ever for sure!

Bug counts are still pretty much unchanged - rumor has it development will pick up again over the next couple of weeks, so it's important the bug database properly reflects current state of AbiWord, thus allowing developers to look at genuine code problems instead of spending time on reproducing bugs that have already been fixed. Users, please help us out by doing some triaging so we'll get a really good release next time!

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 and performance improvements. Very nice, Martin!

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:
----------------------------------------------------
2001.05.18   50 (  +4%)     58 ( +13%)   306 (  +3%)
2001.05.25   55 ( +10%)     89 ( +53%)   287 (  -6%)
2001.06.01   57 (  +3%)     91 (  +2%)   287 (  +0%)
2001.06.08   61 (  +7%)    101 ( +10%)   308 (  +7%)

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

On the Mailing List

Traffic on the developer mailing list has remained low this week, but it appears the US university students are about done with their finals, so we can expect traffic to pick up next week or the week after :)

This week, interesting topics included:

1. Release Schedule: There was more discussion of when the next release should happen, and what it should include.

2. Patch: Encoding Manager: Andrew posted a patch with an Encoding manager. This deals with, as far as I can tell, how to break words - not just hyphenation as we know it from Western languages, but also where to break a line in languages that don't use space to separate words.

3. commit: A number of things: Martin made the mouse pointer image change when moved over the top and side rulers.

4. Commit: Fix bug 119, 106 and major improvements to scrolling speed: Martin made some real nice improvements to the performance of AbiWord and killed some more rendering problems.

5. Commit: basic RTF header/footer import: Hubert added header/footer support to the RTF importer, but later reported problems geting it to work properly. AbiWord loads documents using simpler versions of the editing functions, only allowing stuff to be appended to a document being loaded. This caused problems because of the ordering of headers/footers in the RTF file which does not match the order in which AbiWord keeps the data. Martin suggested a workaround and Hubert is still working on the implementation.

6. Commit: french profile: Hubert also made the default properties for the French locale be cm (metric/centimeters) and A4 paper size. Joaquin quickly copied this for Spanish.