ANNOUNCE: GnuCash 4.900 Released

[John Ralls]

The GnuCash development team announces GnuCash 4.900, the first unstable release leading to GnuCash 5.0.

This is an unstable release for testing purposes. Do not use it with production data! Make a copy of your book to test this release.

New Features

    A new Stock Transaction Assistant to guide you through entering most investment transactions for stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. You can access it from Actions>Stock Assistant when you have the Accounts page ora Stock or Fund account register open.
    A new Investment Lots report showing a graph of capital gains and losses in a period by investment lot. Note that if you don't use the View Lots dialog to manage capital gains and losses this report won't have anything to show you. Use Reports>Assets & Liabilities>Investment Lots to see the report.
    A new tab on the New/Edit Account dialog called More Properties includes entries to set a high and low limit on an account. That's coupled to a new column that's available on the Accounts Page, Balance Limit. If you set a high or low limit and the account balance falls above or below the respective limit an indicator will be shown in the Balance Limit column.
    The description field quickfill in the register now displays a drop-down list of possible completions instead of just one inline completion.
    File import menu items for the MT940, MT942, and DTAUS formats is replaced with a single Import from AQBanking that supports importing any file format supported by AQBanking, including the frequently requested CAMT.

Between 4.13 and 4.900, the following bugfixes were accomplished:
The following fixes will also appear in GnuCash 4.14:

    Bug 798588 - sx scrubbing was using incorrect free function
    Bug 798625 - "Last up through report date" changed in 4.12
    Bug 798679 - Unicode normalization should be used for comparison but not stored.
    Bug 798702 - Crash in gnc_plugin_page_focus_idle_destroy() closing a report before it completes.
    Bug 798705 - New: UI string mismatch: OK vs. Next
    Bug 798717 - Reports > Business > Fancy Invoice duplicates company details

The following additional bug fixes are in unstable only:

    Bug 403979 - Balance column shows only low order digits when too narrow

    If the column is too narrow to display the whole number it will display the leading digits with an ellipsis (…).
    Bug 769256 - Change New Account Dialog

    Rearrange the New and Edit Account dialog to move the parent selector under the description field followed by the account type as a combo (i.e. drop down) list.

The following fixes and improvements were not associated with bug reports:

    Unicode normalization for string matches is changed from NFKC to NFC. This means that font and positional variants will no longer match and is unlikely to affect most users. See Unicode Normalization Forms:Canonical and Compatibility Equivalence for the technical details.
    The Gtk menu structure has been rewritten to use the newer GMenu/GMenuModel system. This change is mostly invisible to users, except that to keep menu accelerators (like <cmd>Q to quit) working on macOS we had to let macOS handle the events. That will affect using cut, copy, and paste in dialog boxes because the menu will intercept them. That's temporary, we hope to have it fixed for GnuCash 4.901.
    The Finance::Quote interface is rewritten in C++. This new design will allow much better capture of diagnostics from Finance::Quote making troubleshooting problems much easier.
    The perl Finance::Quote utilities gnc-fq-check, gnc-fq-dump, and gnc-fq-helper are removed and new commands added to gnucash-cli: --quotes info replaces gnc-fq-check and --quotes dump replaces gnc-fq-dump.

New API: The options system has been rewritten in C++ with Scheme wrappers for report options. While this is invisible to most users, those who have written custom reports should look for deprecation warnings when the custom reports are reconciled. The main difference is that option creation and registration is now done in a single function call. Nearly all standard code defined a local convenience function that wrapped the two steps, for example

        (let* ((options (gnc:new-options))
               (add-option
                 (lambda (new-option)
                  (gnc:register-option options new-option)))))
    

called as

        (add-option
        (gnc:make-string-optionpagename title key docstring default-value))
    

The convenience function is no longer needed, call

        (let* ((options (gnc-new-optiondb)))
        ...
        (gnc-register-string-option options pagename title key docstring default-value)
    

intead. Note that gnc:new-options is now gnc-new-options. There are several similar changes. All of these are wrapped in bindings/guile/options.scm with the old names, but are marked to raise deprecation warnings to encourage you to change. The wrappers will be removed in GnuCash 6.0.

Deprecations: See the deprecation warnings in options.scm as noted above.

New and Updated Translations: Chinese (Simplified), Croatian, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil)

Help translate GnuCash on Weblate.

Translators note that there is a new project Program-beta on weblate for this unstable branch. Having twice the strings causes us to exceed the free account limit, but Weblate has so far just warned us about it. If we need to change the branch we'll announce it on gnucash-devel.
Known Problems

Complete list of all open bugs.
Documentation

Concurrent with the release of GnuCash 4.900 we're pleased to also release a new version of the companion Manual and Tutorial and Concepts Guide

We've made some structural changes and one addition:

    The former Help Manual is renamed The Manual and is now in a directory so named. The redundant 'gnucash' prefix is removed.
    The source directorystructure is rearranged to reflect the installation, with the languages being the top level with each having guide and manual subdirectories.
    Added a Quotes Info example with a sorted and formatted source list.
    Replaced the obsolete ghelp installation file layout with one based on the XDG help specification.

Getting GnuCash for Windows and MacOS

GnuCash is provided for both Microsoft Windows 8.1® and later and MacOS 10.13 (High Sierra)® and later in pre-built, all-in-one packages. An installer is provided for Microsoft Windows® while the MacOS® package is a disk image containing a drag-and-drop application bundle.

GnuCash is also available as a flatpak from Flathub.org. Instructions for installing and running.

The SHA256 Hashes for the downloadable files are:

    e33c020b50bca22cb432583be3aef85e1eec067f6d0b9098f8b5a8fb18590362  gnucash-4.900.tar.bz2
    2b2c35738d73a4d55091814f4a4c80880779defbb5561a2e725ada9ffe1bad2c  gnucash-4.900.tar.gz
    5750c350b63b09c39957c32958aca52785a75153878b2fdef4d020d11e9db600  gnucash-4.900.setup.exe
    b8d1a1442d42f5818a04ef57e68fe9e20c4b6f82d762511934a62981715a6b0c  Gnucash-Intel-4.900-1.dmg
    c81a99d8e9ae287abad1a38f93fdac1a66e27f4f24aed85b25259df30bd1db83  gnucash-docs-4.900.tar.gz


Microsoft Windows:
https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/releases/download/4.900/gnucash-4.900.setup.exe
https://downloads.sourceforge.net/gnucash/gnucash%20%28unstable%29/4.900/gnucash-4.900.setup.exe

Apple macOS:
https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/releases/download/4.900/Gnucash-Intel-4.900-1.dmg
https://downloads.sourceforge.net/gnucash/gnucash%20%28unstable%29/4.900/Gnucash-Intel-4.900-1.dmg

GnuCash is also available as a flatpak from Flathub.org. Instructions for installing and running may be found at https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Flatpak.

Getting GnuCash as source code
If you want to compile GnuCash 4.900 for yourself, the source code can be downloaded from:
https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/releases/download/4.900/gnucash-4.900.tar.bz2
https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/releases/download/4.13/gnucash-4.900.tar.gz
https://downloads.sourceforge.net/gnucash/gnucash%20%28unstable%29/4.900/gnucash-4.900.tar.bz2
https://downloads.sourceforge.net/gnucash/gnucash%20%28unstable%29/4.900/gnucash-4.900.tar.gz

You can also checkout the sources directly from the git repository, see
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Git for instructions.

To compile GnuCash from the source code by yourself, you will need at least Gtk+ 3.24, Guile 2.0, Boost 1.54, WebKitGtk 2.4, GoogleTest 1.7.0, cmake 3.10 and SWIG 2.0.12. Please consult the README.dependencies file in the sources for the exact list of dependencies and versions.

Getting the documentation

Note that the documentation for unstable releases is not on the GnuCash website. It is built daily and may be found on the development server under the locale directory; "C" is English, "de" is German, and so on.

The documentation is included in the MacOS and Windows application bundles.

If you want to compile the GnuCash Documentation 4.900 for yourself, the source code can be downloaded from:
https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/releases/download/4.900/gnucash-docs-4.900.tar.gz
https://downloads.sourceforge.net/gnucash/gnucash%20%28unstable%29/4.900/gnucash-docs-4.900.tar.gz

The documentation is included in the MacOS and Windows application bundles.

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, MacOS, and Microsoft Windows. Programming on GnuCash began in 1997, and its first stable release was in 1998.