Hi everyone,
Well, a lot of development has been done on AbiWord over this past 1 1/2
months or so since 0.7.12 was released. CVS head is significantly more
stable than 0.7.12, has fewer known bugs, and is a heck of a lot more
featureful.
What I'd like to do is release a CVS snapshot of AbiWord in about 2 days.
Call it a 0.9.0 pre-release if you will. There's no need to build any
binaries, but if you'd like to, please do. I'll be providing a number of
builds for GTK+ and Gnome on RH7, for instance. I'll be uploading all
recieved binaries to our Sourceforge site for distribution and making
notices on Gnotices, LWN, freshmeat, etc... Please send either me and/or the
list a notice if you do make a binary, and post the binary on some public
web site. There will be no need for verifications that these things work -
they're pre-release material. But if people would like to verify things,
please feel free to and do so.
Also, I will be moving the lists dialog out of debug for the release. If you
are building a binary and your platform doesn't have a dialog for this, feel
free to revert the #if 1 to an #ifdef DEBUG and pop up the not implemented
dialog.
As for the future (0.9.0 and beyond), what's happening? Well, we need a
styles dialog and the new lists dialog before 0.9.0 is out. Work is underway
on both. I'm also working on a few very small dialogs that I'd like to add
too, but they'll be in RSN (tomorrow?).
The early stages of 0.9.x will represent a soft feature-freeze. We can
change around the look and feel of toolbars, dialogs, menus, etc... and even
add some new functionality. New file filters will be generally accepted
during this phase as well, if people want to hack on them. I'll probably be
doing some work on Word export and OpenOffice filters, and maybe even KWord
too. Other new features will probably be added, but I'm hoping that people
post new feature-related patches to the list for peer-review.
Hopefully, 0.9.x on the whole will be focused on reporting, triaging, and
fixing bugs. As it stands, we have ~241 bugs in bugzilla. Other bug tracking
systems also have abi bugs (gnome, ximian, redhat) but these are generally
duplicates of our bugzilla entries or the results of *very stupid users*.
By the middle of 0.9.x there will be a hard freeze on new strings. A call to
translators will be made. Everyone in our CREDITS.txt under translators will
recieve an email from me. An announcement will also be made on gnome.org's
i18n mailing list to get these people to contribute too. They're damn good
and fast at what they do.
At some arbitrary point, the tree will be frozen and I will accept only bug
fixes into the tree (and possibly a new feature or two *if there is
overwhelming demand and it does not produce new bugs*).
By 1.0, we would ideally have 0 bugs in our software. This is ideal, but it
may not be feasible or even possible. We should attempt to get the known bug
count down to a (subjectively) *very low* number. Of course, some bugs are
more important to fix than others. Also, lots of entries in bugzilla are
RFEs and things that we might not be able to (or even want to) fix. For
example see #305 (flashing on 8 bit displays). Most importantly, there
should be *0* known crash-causing bugs in 1.0.
Comments and suggestions are welcome. Get your ideas and opinions out before
it's too late.
Dom
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