DRAFT: release announcement 1.8.10

[Christian Stimming]

DRAFT

This is a proposed draft for the release announcement of the (hopefully) 
upcoming 1.8.10 release. I thought it might make life easier for wilddev 
if I already summarize some points from the ChangeLog. I thought the 
release announcement should probably be rather short to read, but since 
the gnome2 question will immediately be asked, we should answer this FAQ 
right up front.

Also, the HBCI online banking library change is quite a big issue for 
the people involved, so I would like to have this pointed out already in 
the announcement.

Here's what we might send out as release announcement:

-- snip --

The GnuCash development team proudly announces a new stable release of 
the GnuCash Open Source Accounting Software.

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.

New features in 1.8.10:

- HBCI online banking improved and ported to the new library AqBanking. 
  Those who are using HBCI online banking need to perform some extra 
steps when upgrading, see http://gnomesupport.org/wiki/index.php/GnuCash 
(or in German: http://www.linuxwiki.de/GnuCash )
- OFX import improved and based on the new libofx version 0.7, which 
gives Microsoft OFC support among other things
- Added saving and restoring of customized reports

Improvements and bugs fixed:

- Updated Brazilian Portugese, British English, Czech, Dutch, French,
German, Italian, Russian translations
- HTML export of transaction report improved
- Reports and accounts with zero balance work nicer
- Problems with libltdl3 resolved
- Improved performance when opening large register windows
- Checque printing for Quicken cheques added
- Fixes for the x64_64 platform
- Fixes for the new g-wrap 1.9
- C99/C89 compatibility problems resolved

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 would require the 
changing of the graphing code to probably use Jody's new 
gnome-office-graph code in 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

-- snip --