Call for help: pyabiword in Ubuntu Jaunty

Seems like, unless we make a strong final push, Write and other cool activities that make use of abiword won't run out of the box on the next Ubuntu release. This would mean a significantly less useful Sugar on what may be the widest available Linux distribution.

It would be a real pity because, in addition to the great work that Debian and Ubuntu packagers have already put during the last weeks, we'll have to tell people to use any of the other distributions that will package the whole of Sugar 0.84: Alt Linux, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, openSUSE and Caixa Magica Magalhaes (as per http://sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Packaging).

We still may have time to change this fate if we manage to convince the Ubuntu developers to accept a patch that will build abiword with the libabiword support we need, and package pyabiword.

So this is a call for people that can help with:

• modify the abiword package in Ubuntu to produce libabiword.so and the accompanying -devel stuff,


• package the pyabiword bindings,


• push this through the Ubuntu processes so it gets into their next release,


• forward this call for help to other forums.

Who in this community can help with this or knows someone who may be able to help?

Please update the wiki page linked above with the status of your efforts.