ANNOUNCE: Win32 Port Efforts

[jarney1 at cox.net]

All,

Several months ago, I began an effort with eKos Financial group to port gnucash to the win32 platform.  This work was largely based on the gnucash-2.0.0 release (not the SVN head).  This has resulted in a largely stable gnucash under many versions of  Win32.  This does, however, differ significantly from the SVN version.  While gnucash is only a portion of the entire collection of packages in the eKOSystem, it was the package to which the most change was required to get a clean build.  The guidance from the gnucash wiki was integral to the success of this port.  

Many win32 port efforts consist of loosely coupled sets of packages, each having to be installed manually and conflicts abound.  The approach that eKOS financial has taken is to model the win32 port effort more closely after GNU/Linux  distributions and what results is a GNU/Win32 distribution which we are terming the eKOSystem.

The eKOSystem is a collection of packages based on and extending mingw in a reasonably convenient form distributable in CD form similar to Linux distributions except that it is provided for the Win32 platform.  The packages are called "jpm", short for Jon's Package Manager (similar concept to RPM).

I plan to continue distributing the gnucash port as a part of our system and eventually would like to see some of the features I have added such as asset class reporting integrated back into the SVN stream, but time has prohibited me from working on getting clean enough diffs to send patches.  For now, I am providing the .src.jpm on the eKos financial website (www.ekosfinancial.com/downloads).  

The .src.jpm is similar to a .src.rpm in that it contains everything that we used to build the binary.  In fact, the .src.jpm and .jpm are simply .zip files with different names.

In testing the gnucash port, I have found that gnucash itself is largely stable with the exception of the already observed issues surrounding ORBit.  What we have observed is that ORBit works well on all of the Windows XP 2002 SP 2 in our office, but some Windows XP 2002 SP 2 machines have issues.  We are thusfar unable to isolate the differences that cause the problem but are certainly keenly watching for them.

-Jon Arney
eKos Financial Group
www.ekosfinancial.com