ATTN: AbiWord 2.9.1 released!

[Peter Robinson]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 12:32 AM, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 6:31 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> 2.9.x are development releases so they're not yet in an upstream fedora
>> release. We use the version that ships in Fedora so at the moment its not
>> much use.
>>
>
> Peter,
>
> I guess that is one way to see it, but there are other perspectives.
>
> As 2.9.x represents the first development release of what will become 3.0,
> now is the ideal time to begin looking at it as AbiWord is OLPC's word
> processor of choice on the GNOME boot side and word processing is an
> important activity to deployments.  Better to engage early and have the
> opportunity to shape the direction of further development than to show up
> late to the party.
>
> Some of the key features now present in the 2.9.x series represent the
> culmination of work that was done collaboratively between OLPC and AbiWord
> to develop the Write activity a few years ago.  These features include
> support for collaboration via Telepathy (Jabber/XMPP), so it's release an
> achievement in which OLPC can share some pride with it's friends from
> Collabora who contributed to making this possible.  Improved support for RTL
> languages like Arabic and Hebrew made substantial gains through work on
> Write and is a feature of importance to some of OLPC's deployments.  The
> experiemental EPUB authoring plug-in has the potential to greatly facility
> sharable content creation on the XO.
>

There's a number of important points that you completely miss. Abiword
already has collaboration support in Fedora due to the OLPC collaboration
from eons ago. This has been the case for ages. We have for quite some time
used mostly upstream Fedora to minimise doubled work. This change changes it
to upstream XMPP standards (at least that's my understanding) and I don't
know how that would work with the existing versions which would in turn
break all existing deployments.


> Or I suppose you could ignore it until 3.0 ships and then figure this stuff
> out in a rush and be too late to have any influence or further leverage the
> historical ties between OLPC and AbiWord that have so far proven remarkably
> beneficial to both communities, YMMV.
>

I think those comments are both naive, misinformed and irrelevant. We aren't
ignoring it, it will go into Fedora when the upstream maintainer who also
happens to be the Fedora maintain and the person who did all the
collaboration work for OLPC back in the day believes its ready to do so. I
believe that will be in what is currently rawhide, so what will become
F-16/SoaS-6 where we can properly test it and see what impact it will have.

Peter
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