Older blog entries for Jody (starting at number 25)

Ryan Solomon Goldberg Was born On July 19. Pictures are available at the website. He's doing nicely and has a good set of lungs (which is why I'm typing this at 3:45am).

We released Gnumeric 0.68 at about the same time which added support for frozen panes. Since then development has slowed a bit due to summer vacations and diaper duty. However, things are still moving along. All known lingering bugs associated with panes have now been fixed in CVS, and work on graphs has finally commenced. My target of a July freeze has unfortunately died. However, I have high hopes for keeping the slippage down to one month, and freezing graphs later in August. 0.69 is targetted for next weekend.

After a rash of releases 0.66, 0.67 that moved us onto bonobo's ui support by default. I'm starting to tackle graphs and frozen panes. Panes are now partially functional in CVS wioth more code to follow shortly. In the mean time JonKare is progressing nicely on proper support for gnumeric as a BonoboControl.

Ok, the first round of recalc changes are in and seem stable. We are now somewhat more competative when recalculating large sheets and it is easy to see what changes to make to move us past OpenCalc. XL is still an order of magnitude faster. We'll need alot of care to move closer.

After lots of last minute battles with automake, libtool, and gettext I declated victory and released.

1) libtool-1.4 requires automake-1.4p1. The p1 is important it means that users of debian unstable need to manually install p1 until packages are available.

2) gettext-0.10.37 does not like 8bit characters as strid's for multibyte encodings (ja, ko, zh) I was forced to disable those translations until we can figure out what the expected input encoding is.

Despite these irritations and delays Gnumeric 0.65 was finally released. It should be very solid. Our 3 best bug sleuths were reduced to reporting minor irritations. Now its time to focus on graphs.

We're ramping up for the next release. The current code base is looking pretty good. It is moving along nicely towards easy support for frozen panes.

Released 0.63
This version has been heavily tested and is suitable for packaging. I hope nothing pops up today because the avalanche of patches that have been held back are starting to flow in.

Update: It seems the best way to get things tested is to release them...
Just received several test sheets with problems. So far I've only looked at the first but it has indeed demonstrated several errors. Nothing that crashes but several span/hide inconsistencies. I hope we can get another release out before 1.4.

Released 0.62. Was quite pleased with it. Went to sleep.
Almer started testing AFTER the release and has turned up one crash in the new border code (Yet another fence post problem) and piles of irritating inconsistencies. Another release is planned for next weekend once all the repairs are tested.

I've announced a release target date of Feb 17 with a freeze on Feb 10.

The border drawing cleanup is done, printing needs some improvements for wide lines, but is working reasonably. All of the release critical cleanups for the style engine are in place and we are looking good for release. Zbigniew's plugin manager has gone in. I've also cleaned up a few annoying aspects of sheet object creation and manipulation. In general this next release promises to be pretty good.

With much help from Morten and Almer the transition to bugzilla has been completed. Many thanks to Martin for all the hard work getting it set up.

It has been a busy week. The quad tree styles are committed and reasonably tested. There is a small loose end that needs to be done before release, but all in all the transition looks successful. One of the nice implications of the transition is that we now have an easy way to get a sequence of styles/borders. As a result the long standing hack of only draw the top & left borders and shifting the others is dead. Lots of pixel tuning is needed before all the corners right but that should finally be feasible.

JPablo and Morten are most of the way through a find/replace dialog. Almer is revamping the STF dialog to use the number selector from the format dialog. JonKare has fixed the last of the breakgage from the MVC split, the window sizes from XL are finally working again. The great plugin cleanup is nearing completion, Zbigniew has done alot of work. So much so that I've actually asked him to leave some out for now. Sorry, Zbigniew.

The new asymetric-quadtree code is shaping up nicely. Gnumeric can now load a sheet with 900,000 cells within acceptable performace bounds. We still use almost 4x as much memory as MS excel (tm) but that should improve as some of the other new toys I'm planning come on line. Merged cell support is mostly complete. I've enabled it by default now. Kick it around if possible.

The very prolific Zbigniew Chyla has joined the team and is generating a steady stream of patches to improve translation support. His latest work greatly extends the management of plugins. I hope to get the patch in for the next release. Jon Kare has returned as is pumping some nice cleanups to the UI and file I/O routines. My long standing dream of a GUI-less gnumeric engine is getting closer and closer to reality. With a bit of luck he may even start work on supporting frozen panes ! Almer is still hard at work on the stf.

We've been pretty lucky with 0.61, no really obvious boneheaded problems have surfaced. That is giving us some time before 0.62 comes out. I'll tentatively aim for Feb 1 as a good date to get things stabilized. What we really need is for distributions to start shipping 0.61, the waterfall of bug reports from old (ancient) versions is enormous. I suppose that means that people are actually using Gnumeric.