AbiWord development has been progressing at a marvelous clip and it's getting to the point where we should put another big, fancy DOT-OH release out there.
These past 8 months or so have seen an absolutely tremendous amount of work. The 2.0 release will be focussed on stabilizing and polishing those new features, adding a few remaining features, and making sure that we haven't regressed with regard to our previous (1.0) feature set. I said this before I released 1.0 - "This isn't to mark the end of AbiWord development, it marks the beginning." Well, 2.0 marks an incremental advancement towards that mythical end. 2.0 will have bugs. 2.0 will lack features. This is to be expected. But we promise to do our best to keep the nasties to a minimum and incorporate missing features into future releases. Target Platforms: Win32 *NIX (Linux, BSD, Solaris, XDarwin in particular) QNX If the MacOSX/Cocoa build progresses substantially, we might have an "experimental" release of it. I will not hold back the 2.0 release on MacOSX's behalf. At present, I'm using bug 4468 as a tracker bug for many of the issues that stand in the way of the 2.0 release. 4468 is not complete, but we'll work on making it better represent how we want 2.0 to come out. Expected New Features (in addition to our current feature set): * Better mail merge UI * Gnome Port (GnomePrint, GAL toolbar widgets, and the Bonobo control only for now) Expected polish/bugfix/improved 2.0 features: * Tables (UI, interaction, imp/exp) * Footnotes (needs imp/exp to RTF, DOC) * Endnotes (make work again, imp/exp) * Revisions (make work properly, imp/exp) * BiDi * XFT fonts on unix * Unix printing * OpenOffice importer/exporter * Mail merge * Barbarisms Expected polish/bugfix/improvements over 1.0 features: * HTML import/export * GTK2 UI (ideally remove any deprecated widgets/functions, make work on both GTK 2.0 and 2.2) * XSL-FO import/export * Spelling problems * Help problems * Crash problems These lists are by no means meant to be exhaustive. All suggestions should be sent to the list in a reply to this email. So, timelines... This needs to be a delicate balance between a set schedule and a "release it when it's ready" mentatlity. Tentatively, I'm thinking that we should AIM to have 2.0 out by May 1st, 2003. Jan 22: 1.1.3 release. Soft feature freeze. No features not listed above allowed in. February 22: 2.0alpha1 release. March 1: Hard feature freeze (1 1/2 months for above feature work). Only polish and bugfixes on above "New" features allowed. Anything missing punted to beyond 2.0. 2.0beta1 release. 2 months until release. March 30: String and documentation freeze. Translations accepted, no new en-US. 2.0beta2 release. April 6: 2.0beta3 release April 13: 2.0rc1 release April 20: No more strings, even translated ones (3 weeks from March 30). 2.0rc2 release April 27: Tree frozen. No more commits except for HUGE problems, trivial provably non-regression-causing, or build fixes. May 1: 2.0 released, with various source and binary packages available. May 5, 2003: Partying stopped, hangovers getting (marginally) better. All commits in the "RC" period (April 13->May 1) need to be authorized by myself and/or Martin. No exceptions. Patches are to be sent to the list in 'cvs diff -u' format. All commits from March 1->May 1 may not break the tree intentionally. Stub functionality on alternate platforms, or coordinate your work with the other platform maintainers. There will be nightly builds and testing thereof during the "RC" period. KJD has win32 nightlies, Marc has Linux RPMs from his tinderbox. Matthew Craig is working on a regression and unit test suite. Some of us have helped him with it so far. He's rounded up some testers and seems to be off to a good start. We'll need help from all involved during these upcoming months. We'll need patience from the developers, as I know you'll all be itching to work on new features and hating the seemingly endless bugfixing. Please do your best to squash bugs. I know better than anyone how much the 1.0 process hurt. Hopefully this will be less painful. But be prepared to endure it again. We'll need help from the users. We'll need people to scour bugzilla, fill in the twiki, fill up bugzilla with new bugs, work on the testsuite. Please respond to this mail with thoughts and ideas. I'd write more here, but my hands hurt. Cheers, Dom __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
