<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt"><div>Announcement: GnuCash 2.3.4 Release<br>2009-08-19 <br>GnuCash 2.3.4 released<br>The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.3.4, the<br>fifth of several unstable 2.3.x releases of the GnuCash Free Accounting<br>Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.4.0. With<br>this new release series, GnuCash can use an SQL database using SQLite3,<br>MySQL or PostgreSQL. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Microsoft<br>Windows and Mac OSX. This release is intended for developers and<br>testers who want to help tracking down all those bugs that are still in<br>there.<br><br>WARNING WARNING WARNING - Make sure you make backups of any files<br>used in testing versions of GnuCash in the 2.3.x series. Although the<br>developers go to great lengths to ensure that no data will be
lost we<br>cannot guarantee that your data will not be affected if for some reason<br>GnuCash crashes in testing these releases.<br><br>PLEASE TEST TEST AND TEST SOME MORE any and all features important to you.<br>Then post any bugs you find to bugzilla<br><br>Major changes in the 2.3.x release include; <br> * In addition to the XML backend, Gnucash can now use a SQLite3,<br>MySQL or PostgreSQL database to store the data. This is a new<br>implementation using libdbi. It supports all features including the<br>business features. In order to build with this, add --enable-dbi to the<br>configure command. In addition to the libdbi-dev package for your<br>distribution, you will also need the appropriate DBD (libdbi driver)<br>package for sqlite3, mysql or postgresql.<br> * In addition to the current GtkHTML HTML engine used to display<br>reports and graphs, Gnucash can use WebKit. WebKit is the engine used<br>by Google
Chrome on Windows and Safari on Apple. In order to build with<br>this, add --enable-webkit to the configure command. You will need an<br>appropriate webkit-dev package. On win32, you will need to download the<br>webkit-1.1.5-win32.zip file from the source repository and put it into<br>the downloads directory of your gnucash build area.<br> * Updated to AqBanking 3 on Win32.<br>Changes between 2.3.3 and 2.3.4 include: <br> * Changes in database schema. The "helper" tables (slots,<br>recurrences, taxtable_entries) which can have multiple entries per<br>object now have a unique, auto-increment integer primary key. Dates and<br>date/times stored in the database are now stored in DATE and TIMESTAMP<br>columns (mysql and pgsql). The "hidden" and "placeholder" account flags<br>are now stored in individual fields in the accounts table. A new<br>budget_amounts table contains 1 record per budget per account per<br>period and
contains the budget amount for that account/period. The<br>scheduled transaction end date is now being stored. The versions table<br>now has the table name as the primary key, and NULL values are<br>disallowed for all fields. <br><br>Because of these changes, you will need to delete and recreate<br>your database. If you want to save your data, save it to XML before<br>upgrading to 2.3.4, upgrade, then load the XML file and save to a new<br>database or over your existing database.<br> * The standard report .scm files are now in /share/gnucash/guile-modules/gnucash/report/standard-reports.<br>When gnucash is started, it will scan this directory and load each .scm<br>file into the report menu system. This means that if you want to add a<br>new report to gnucash, you only need to copy it into this directory.<br> * Updated Japanese translation<br> * Updated Dutch translation<br> *
Updated Danish translation<br> * Fixed bug 591614: Saving to postgresql causes zombie scheduled transactions.<br> * Ensure template root account (used for scheduled transactions) is stored even if there are no scheduled transactions<br> * Accounts can be stored even if commodity=NULL<br>
* Fix bug 589418: commodities were not being stored properly. This
should solve the problem of the disappearing commodities.<br> * Improvements in the budget report: <br> 1. For income accounts, the sign of the "difference" column is reversed so that positive values are good (more than budget).<br> 2. Fix wrapping problems in budget cells (account labels, negative values, values in certain currencies)<br> 3. Budget report can now display negative values in red. This requires use of the Default-CSS stylesheet<br> 4. Period dates are now centered properly over the columns for that period<br> 5. Add an option to the budget report. If enabled, and an account does<br>not have a budget value for the period, the budget values for all child<br>accounts are added. If the chart of accounts is set up so that only<br>leaf accounts have transactions, this allows budget values to be<br>assigned either to all children and
not the parent (they will be<br>summed) or the parent.<br> * Changed --enable-webkit configure option to --with-html-engine=XXX where XXX is "gtkhtml" (default) or "webkit".<br> * Merged latest pot template into all .po translation files.<br> * Fixed signed vs unsigned char pointer type conflicts.<br>Caveats for Testers<br>Any 2.3.x version might crash unexpectedly at any point during<br>runtime. If you test some serious work in a 2.3.x release and are using<br>the XML file backend for data storage, make sure you hit "Save" after<br>every non-trivial workstep. If you are using the SQL backend, this is<br>not required as every change is saved immediately to the database.<br>The documentation has had screenshots updated, however, many<br>help texts usually only refers to the 1.8.x series. Everyone is invited<br>to help improve the documentation; see <a href="http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development"
target="_blank">http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development</a> on how to get involved.<br><br>How can you help?<br>Testing: Test it and help us discover all bugs that might show up in there. Please enter each and every bug into bugzilla.<br><br>Translating: The new release comes with some new translation<br>strings. If you consider contributing a translation, we invite you to<br>test this release already. A string freeze will be announced in one of<br>the later 2.3.x releases. Please check <a href="http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Translation_Status" target="_blank">http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Translation_Status</a> for updates on this.<br><br>We would like to encourage people to test this and any further<br>releases as much as possible and submit bug reports in order that we<br>can polish GnuCash to be as stable as possible for the 2.4.0 release in<br>a few weeks. Then post any bugs you find to bugzilla<br><br>Getting GnuCash<br><span>Source code for
GnuCash 2.3.4 can be downloaded from <a target="_blank" href="http://www.gnucash.org">www.gnucash.org</a> or </span><a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/files" target="_blank">https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/files</a> under "gnucash<br>(unstable)".<br><br>To install GnuCash, users will need Gnome 2, guile, slib and swig.<br><br><a href="http://www.gnucash.org/" target="_blank">http://www.gnucash.org</a><br><br>Win32 binary<br>The Gnucash 2.3.4 Win32 setup executable can be downloaded from <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/files" target="_blank">https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/files</a>. Look under "gnucash<br>(unstable)". <br><br>About the Program<br>GnuCash is a free, open source accounting program released under the<br>GNU General Public License (GPL) and available for GNU/Linux, *BSD,<br>Solaris, Mac OSX and Microsoft Windows. Programming on GnuCash began in<br>1997, and its first stable release was in
1998.</div></div></body></html>