AbiWord Community Outreach Project

In this first post about community news, AbiWord gets a slightly inaccurate mention on LugRadio as well as a wishful mention on a blog - read on for more info and the emailed replies!
LUGRadio is a biweekly podcast popular with the GNOME crowd. During a segment about documentation for projects, AbiWord was mentioned by virtue of its developing AbiCollab plugin. Though the segment inaccurately stated libobby is used for collaboration (it is not, only loudmouth for jabber transport), community awareness is awareness! The following message was sent to the show email - watch here for updates if a reply surfaces!

Hello there! Just started listening to LUG Radio after hearing about it for a long time on Planet GNOME. I’ve added your feed to my Rhythmbox and started listening with the oldest one on the feed.

I am involved with the AbiWord project and thought you might like to know a clarification. You mentioned AbiWord’s collaboration feature under development several times. This feature is indeed under development, and actually works at the moment and is being polished right now. What I heard in your show that was inaccurate was the reference to libobby. While re-using that code was considered early in the process, we do not use that library right now. AbiCollab is a collaborative protocol that transports AbiWord “Change Records” (part of the internal representation of the document) over a standard XMPP (”Jabber”) transport (all you need is two Jabber accounts on some server - one for each editor). It currently supports editing all structures that AbiWord supports (as far as I know), and support for multi-colored cursors/carets (typing insertion pointers) - one for each attached AbiWord editor - was added recently. Currently work is being done on making “Undo” make sense and do what would be expected - only undoing changes performed locally. Anyone who would like to download the CVS source code and give it a try is welcome to - if you drop by #AbiWord on irc.gimp.org, there will probably be someone there who can help you with it (after you read the build docs of course ) and possibly even give you a demo. In the way of dependencies, rather than libobby, AbiCollab only depends on the Loudmouth Jabber/XMPP library. The build dependencies are all available in Ubuntu 6.06 “Dapper” and most likely FC5 as well (I personally use Ubuntu).

On the subject of creating documentation, we have a Google Summer of Code contributor who has been working with the project for a while, and he has recently overhauled and greatly improved the DocBook import/export support. Most of these changes will be available in the 2.4 stable series, however, the full impact of the Summer of Code will be felt best in the upcoming 2.6 release and the 2.5 development alpha and beta releases preceding it.

Thanks for mentioning AbiWord - it’s a great project that I strongly believe in, and I’m looking forward to the release of 2.6 which will feature this great new collaboration technology!

Also with regard to AbiCollab, we got name-dropped on Luis Villa’s blog, syndicated on Planet Gnome. I sent him (and the dev list) an email with more information, and have included here both my message and his reply on the AbiWord dev list!

My email:

Just saw your blog post and thought I’d comment, but since I can’t, I’ll send an email. You mention that you use Writely instead of Abi at work due to collaboration. I thought I’d let you know that we have several hackers working hard on AbiCollab, an awesome collaborative editing system that uses Jabber as the transport, and that it’s scheduled for release with version 2.6 of AbiWord. Already, before even the 2.5.0 development release, it “works” and should be useable - further work is being done on making the interface (especially starting and ending collaboration) more intuitive, making things work “as you’d expect” (undo undoes only local changes, etc). Multiple carets (cursors), one for each connected user and displayed in color, are already implemented as well. Just thought you’d like to know that soon you will be able to use a desktop app for that purpose! We’ve even got a dedicated SoC hacker working on making import/export support for a variety of formats even more accurate and dependable, so keep a close eye on our releases!

Thanks for reading!

Ryan

And here’s the reply:

Knew it was in progress; did not know it was so close to completion
(had been underway for over a year, right?) I’d love to play with it-
are there ubuntu packages somewhere? (I’m trying to get away from
building things from source

And now that I know my anti-spam stuff works (sadly, it isn’t open
source either, grr) I guess I’ll finally turn on comments…

Luis

Thanks for the email, Luis! There aren’t any Ubuntu packages yet (we haven’t even got 2.5.0, the first dev release of this series out), but CVS HEAD does build on Ubuntu. Just apt-get build-dep abiword-gnome, then apt-get install loudmouth (and I think loudmouth-dev), and that should work. You may need to install wv from AbiWord CVS or a released 1.2.2 - I don’t remember offhand if the version in Ubuntu does the trick for pre-2.5.0

Till next time, keep it up, ants!