ANNOUNCE: Gnucash 2.3.7 released

[Phil Longstaff]

Announcement: GnuCash 2.3.7 Release
2009-10-07

GnuCash 2.3.7 released

The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.3.7, the eighth of 
several unstable 2.3.x releases of the GnuCash Free Accounting Software which 
will eventually lead to the stable version 2.4.0. With this new release 
series, GnuCash can use an SQL database using SQLite3, MySQL or PostgreSQL. It 
runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX. This release 
is intended for developers and testers who want to help tracking down all 
those bugs that are still in there.

WARNING WARNING WARNING - Make sure you make backups of any files used in 
testing versions of GnuCash in the 2.3.x series. Although the developers go to 
great lengths to ensure that no data will be lost we cannot guarantee that 
your data will not be affected if for some reason GnuCash crashes in testing 
these releases.

NOTE: This is an *UNSTABLE* version of Gnucash.  The latest stable version is
2.2.9.

PLEASE TEST TEST AND TEST SOME MORE any and all features important to you.
Then post any bugs you find to bugzilla

Major changes in the 2.3.x release include;
* In addition to the XML backend, Gnucash can now use a SQLite3, MySQL or 
PostgreSQL database to store the data. This is a new implementation using 
libdbi. It supports all features including the business features.  In order to 
build with this, add --enable-dbi to the configure command.  In addition to the 
libdbi-dev package foryour distribution, you will also need the appropriate 
DBD (libdbi driver) package for sqlite3, mysql or postgresql.
* In addition to the current GtkHTML HTML engine used to display reports and 
graphs, Gnucash can use WebKit. WebKit is the engine used by Google Chrome on 
Windows and Safari on Apple.  In order to build with this, add --with-html-
engine=webkit to the configure command.  You will need an appropriate webkit-
dev package.  On win32, you wil lneed to download the webkit-1.1.5-win32.zip 
file from the source repository and put it into the downloads directory of your 
gnucash build area.
* Updated to AqBanking 3 on Win32.

Changes between 2.3.6 and 2.3.7 include:
* Revert changes which caused gnucash to crash on startup on windows
* More recent version of gmp on win32
* Postgresql binary package on win32 now includes msvcr71.dll
* Fix compiler warnings.  Patch by Colin Law
* Fix for balance column displayed in template register
* Update of Polish translation by Jacek Baszkiewicz

Caveats for Testers
* Any 2.3.x version might crash unexpectedly at any point during runtime. If 
you test some serious work in a 2.3.x release and are using the XML file 
backend for data storage, make sure you hit "Save" after every non-trivial 
work step.  If you are using the SQL backend, this is not required as every 
change is saved immediately to the database.
* The documentation has had screenshots updated, however, many help texts 
usually only refers to the 1.8.x series. Everyone is invited to help improve 
the documentation; see http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development on how to get 
involved.

How can you help?
* Testing: Test it and help us discover all bugs that might show up in there.  
Please enter each and every bug into bugzilla.
* Translating: The new release comes with some new translation strings. If you 
consider contributing a translation, we invite you to test this release 
already. A string freeze will be announced in one of the later 2.3.x releases.  
Please check http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Translation_Status for updates on 
this.

We would like to encourage people to test this and any further releases as 
much as possible and submit bug reports in order that we can polish GnuCash to 
be as stable as possible for the 2.4.0 release in a few weeks. Then post any 
bugs you find to http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=GnuCash

Getting GnuCash
* Source code for GnuCash 2.3.7 can be downloaded from 
http://www.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash/sources/unstable/2.3.x or 
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/files under "gnucash (unstable)".
* To install GnuCash, users will need Gnome 2, guile, slib and swig.
* Win32 binary - The Gnucash 2.3.7 Win32 setup executable can be downloaded 
from https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/files.  Look under "gnucash 
(unstable)".

About the Program
GnuCash is a free, open source accounting program released under the GNU 
General Public License (GPL) and available for GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Mac 
OSX and Microsoft Windows.  Programming on GnuCash began in 1997, and its first 
stable release was in 1998.

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