1.8.12 draft release notes (was: Proposals about gnucash-gnome2)

[Christian Stimming]

Hi Chris,

this is great news! Thanks for coming back on this. I don't think we 
have to decide on the gnucash-gnome2 release cycle right now. Right now 
it is just sufficient to make that 1.8.12 release, and then continue 
coding on the gnome2 code.

Chris Lyttle schrieb:
> Well Christian, this is timely. For about the first time in 6 months or
> so I have some bandwidth to be able to do some release work. I am not
> sure right now that I'd be able to handle a more often release cycle
> that gnucash 1.10/2.0 release would entail, but I'd certainly be willing
> to devote some time towards it.

Thanks for that. In order to help out a bit, I updated the draft 1.8.12 
release notes from August. See below.

As for a gnome2 release date announcement: I agree with Didier Vidal 
that we should use this opportunity to announce a release date for the 
very first pre-alpha pre-beta pre-whatever gnucash-gnome2 release 
(called 1.9.x, the uneven number emphasizing the development nature). 
IMHO the current gnome2-branch can be released for public testing 
already in a few weeks -- most of the main "places for work" are only 
seldomly crashing :-). I would be totally fine if we expect something 
between 4-8 months of 1.9.x development releases, until we consider the 
code base stable enough for a stable release. Given such a timeframe, I 
think it is possible for us to make very first 1.9.x testing releases in 
a few weeks, so announcing "December 2005" would be appropriate. (And 
such a date is still flexible enough so that a delay into January 2006 
would be tolerated as well.)

> As for 1.8.12, do we still want to do the release build on rh7.3 or use
> a perhaps more modern build of rh?

Do you mean as a testing environment, as the build tool environment, or 
as a binary package environment? IMHO you don't need to create binary 
packages anyway. I saw that you faithfully created binary RPMs for all 
gnucash releases that we had, but IMHO we just don't need that. We 
cannot provide binary RPMs for even the major distributions because 
there are just too many of them around. If at your place RH is the 
single largest distributions, there will surely be other places where 
other distros have the majority (e.g. suse in Germany). So given a 
limited time for release work, I would definitely propose to not release 
any binary RPMs but only the .tar.gz packages. The majority of users 
will have to compile gnucash on their own anyway -- or they will wait 
until their distributor provides the binary RPM. Of course if you really 
want to compile RPMs then just go ahead, but the time consumption of the 
RPM creation shouldn't be the limiting factor in making such a release.

Regards

Christian



***** draft release notes for gnucash-1.8.12 ******* DRAFT *******

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 [e.g.] 
this December [or whatever we decide to consider appropriate].

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

***** draft release notes for gnucash-1.8.12 ******* DRAFT *******