ANNOUNCE: Release of GnuCash stable version 1.8.12

[Chris Lyttle]

The GnuCash development team proudly announces a new stable release of 
the GnuCash Open Source Accounting Software version 1.8.12, which is 
expected to be the very last release of the gtk1-based gnucash-1.8.x 
series. The next release series of gnucash will be based on
gtk2/gnome2, 
and the first pre-release packages are expected to be released 
this December.

FAQ: "Is this a gnome2 application?" A: "No." This release still
belongs 
to GnuCash's 1.8.x series which is not yet ported to gtk2/gnome2. Read 
more below.

What's New in GnuCash 1.8.12?

* Online Banking/HBCI improvements: Debit notes are fixed again; 
Bank-internal money transfers are now supported, if the HBCI bank
offers 
them; Setup wizard can now works with HBCI, OFX-Connect, and other 
AqBanking backends; Fix character encoding issues in utf-8 locales; Fix 
date interval in the import transaction matcher for OFX and HBCI
import; 
Fix PIN entry bug.

* New currencies added: Romanian Leu, Bulgarian Lev, Malagasy Ariary

* Fix problem with long date formats in some locales (bug#170444)

* Add configure macros for mips, mipsel, arm, and m68k; Fix compilation 
on OpenBSD 64bit architectures

* Updated translations: German, Italian, Kinyarwanda

FAQ: "Is this a gnome2 application?"
A: "No." This release still belongs to GnuCash's 1.8.x series which is 
not yet ported to gtk2/gnome2. In other words, this release is still 
based on gtk1.2/gnome1. The developers are working on a gtk2/gnome2 
version of GnuCash, but it still takes a lot of time.
See http://gnomesupport.org/wiki/index.php/GnuCashPortingStatus for the 
status of the Gtk2 port. GnuCash makes use of several custom widgets as 
well as the Guppi graphing library. To port to gtk2 involves rewriting 
those widgets (e.g. the ledger, or the account hierarchy which uses 
GtkCTree) into the appropriate GTK2 widgets and changing the graphing 
code to use Jody's new gnome-office-graph code of Gnumeric (Guppi was 
never ported to gtk2 and is a dead project). But given that the GnuCash 
team is extremely short on programmers, the process has to exist in 
parallel to existing product improvements, resulting in a very gradual 
porting process.
If you can code C, by all means, volunteer your time, see 
http://gnomesupport.org/wiki/index.php/GnuCashDevelopment