Re: Abi 3.0 should target compatibility issues

From: Alan Horkan (horkana@maths.tcd.ie)
Date: Wed Sep 24 2003 - 12:43:35 EDT

  • Next message: Dom Lachowicz: "Fwd: Re: Abi 3.0 should target compatibility issues"

    I wish I had responed to this thread sooner.

    On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, r coyne wrote:

    > Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 17:17:12 -0700 (PDT)
    > From: r coyne <duckingsnofair@yahoo.com>
    > To: abiword-user@abisource.com
    > Subject: Abi 3.0 should target compatibility issues
    >
    > [If this belongs on the developer list, someone please
    > forward; I've never gotten acquainted with that one.]
    >
    > Now that Abiword 2 is out, more or less (and people
    > are even speaking of 2.2), it's time to put in my two
    > cents worth on planning for Abi 3. Reading the posts
    > here, I am continually struck (and appalled, and
    > scared off) by how fragile abi is. One seems to need

    Please file bug reports! Get (more?) involved, please help out in any way
    you can.

    As for plugin incompatibilities you have to read this statement of the
    level of support to expect from Abiword (which is slightly more than
    none, you get what you pay for):
    http://abisource.com/support/expectations.phtml

    You also need to remember that the only stable and officially supported
    releases of abiword have been the versions 1.0.x and now the first 2.0.x
    releases.

    I accept the stable release do require plugins be of the same version, but
    the only more reliable practical alternative at this time is not to
    provide them as optional plugins at all, and provide a big fat abiword
    binary and I dont think that would make anyone very happy.

    Everything else is unstable and unsupported. Unstable software can be
    easilly identified because the second (middle) number will always be odd,
    this is a standard convention amongs open source software projects.

    > And then, of course, there's the whole issue of
    > intelligent, informative, crash-proof handling of
    > error conditions, and the need for careful, loving
    > attention to documentation.

    Known crashes are handled by fixing the problem.
    It is very difficult to anything much about unknown crashes but Abiword
    has an Autosave feature and Abiword also has a feature that will produce
    a abiword-document.abw.CRASHED containing the exact state of the document
    at the time of the crash. Great effort has been made to make sure that
    problems with Abiword will not result in data loss. Data loss bugs have
    always been taken extremely seriously by the abiword developers.

    > What I am saying, basically, is that with the release
    > of 2.0, abi is probably approaching the point of
    > diminishing returns to features. 3.0 should be about
    > bulletproofing and getting it "ready for prime time";
    > in other words, this is the time to "start over from
    > the beginning and this time do it right," now that you
    > understand the problems.

    I hope you realise how the developers who have worked so hard on Abiword
    for so long could be somewhat offended by that.

    There is one bug report that I think would be helpful now that there are
    two major stable release of abiword but even so it is not unreasonable to
    expect users to upgrade to the current stable version given that abiword
    is free.
    http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=3856

    > that, especially in a decentralized, volunteer
    > organization like abi, with no one exactly in charge
    > and authorized to turn the whole thing on a dime,

    Dom Lachowicz is very much in charge of Abiword.
    "I for one welcome our benevolent dictator" ;)

    > institutional habit and momentum may inhibit the sort
    > of grand rethinking I'm talking about, even when it is needed.

    I hope you will stick around and get to know the structure of the abiword
    community a little better and contribute in whatever ways you can manage.

    Sincerely

    Alan Horkan
    http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

    -----------------------------------------------
    To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to
    abiword-user-request@abisource.com with the word
    unsubscribe in the message body.



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Wed Sep 24 2003 - 12:58:19 EDT