Proposals about gnucash-gnome2

[Christian Stimming]

Hi Developers,

two different issues just popped up about the current gnucash development. 
First, some latest changes in CVS seem to have introduced unexpected 
conflicts, though the changes are considered to be of lower priority by many 
developers here. Second, the pressure for a gnome2-gnucash is increasing 
all around. I have some proposals as a response to these points, and I'd like 
to explain these here.

I think that gnucash isn't that far away from an actual gnome2 release 
anymore. However, we as a developer team have been lacking a clear 
communication about the current status, the currently important goals, and 
the roadmap for the near-future development. I propose that we should firmly 
restating the actual vision for gnucash and the current view of the  
developer team on the best roadmap to a gnome2 release. Something like: "The 
gnome2 port of gnucash is under way. At first, we will try to keep all major 
features of the 1.8.x release but under the new GUI toolkit. This might be 
achieved in the next 2..4..6 months. Only after we achieve an initial 
gnucash-gnome2 series, we will focus on improving the existing features and 
add brand-new additional features to keep our status as the best free finance 
manager around." As a relatively easy technical step to underline our 
commitment to a gnome2 release, I would  suggest to merge back the 
gnucash-gnome2-dev branch into HEAD. On IRC, David Hampton already agreed to 
work on this important CVS action.

Related to this is the question about the qof-work, which is not immediately 
vital for the gnucash-gnome2 port. In my opinion the work in that area is 
going on well, but unfortunately the goals of the qof-work and those of other 
developers silently diverged at some point. I think we should clearly confirm 
that the architectural changes related to qof, including the division between 
an external libqof and gnucash, are *not* immediatly the focus of the 
gnucash-gnome2 port. This work should therefore (please, please) *not* 
interfere with work that improves the gnome2 port and only the gnome2 port. 
The technical solution to that issue is quite simple: I would suggest that 
the qof-work should get its own CVS branch (qof-devel or similar), and then 
those working on qof will be responsible for merging other people's changes 
into that branch. This will of course be quite easy once the gnome2-branch is 
merged back into HEAD, so that the HEAD branch will be the point for the 
gnome2 progress. 

And additionally I would again propose to have a 1.8.12 release, because it 
contains numerous bugfixes which should be released (please please :). I would 
volunteer in the tarball preparation and the necessary announcements. 

An interesting side-effect of a 1.8.12 release is that we as a developer team 
communicate the fact that we're alive and active and caring about the users, 
all the while such a release is technically quite easy for us. And of course 
the respective announcement can be used to communicate the active gnome2 
progress. 

Regards,

Christian