Gnucash 2.4.0 released

[John Ralls]

On Dec 31, 2010, at 2:12 AM, Geert Janssens wrote:

> I'm very happy with the new stable release.Congrats to all developers.
> 
> I do have a note on the release announcement. It starts off with a big warning 
> that any previous version should be installed, particularly on Windows.
> 
> Actually I made changes in the Windows installer (in r19528) that takes care 
> of this automatically. From the commit log:
> 
> <quote>
> Bug #588414 - Got "Entry Point Not Found" errors starting GnuCash?, but ran OK
> The problem is caused by leftover files from a previous install.
> The solution is to uninstall GnuCash? before installing a new version in such 
> cases.
> This commit adds a compatibility test and uninstall step to the windows 
> installer
> that will automatically uninstall the previous gnucash release if it is 
> considered
> 'incompatible' with the one to be installed. The user will be warned of this, 
> so
> he can decide to cancel the installation if he doesn't like the idea of 
> uninstalling
> his working GnuCash? installation.
> Currently, versions are considered 'incompatible' if their major or minor 
> version
> components are different, so 2.3.x is incompatible with 2.2.x and will trigger
> an uninstall. Likewise, a 2.4.x install is incompatible with a 2.3.x and will
> trigger an uninstall. This is a nice way to remove all testing 'cruft' from 
> the
> system once the new release comes out.
> Note that in the future installing 2.3.16+ over 2.4.x will also trigger the 
> uninstall, which is
> a good thing IMO. An older release can't know about changes made in a newer 
> one,
> so it's safer to first uninstall the newer one to avoid leftover files. 
> </quote>
> 
> So I think it would be good to improve the release announcement, particularly 
> on the website. Several people have been asking about this already on the 
> mailing list.
> 
> I'm not really sure how though. Is this message purely there for the Windows 
> "Parse error" messages ? In that case it can simply be removed. But if it is 
> also important to remove prior GnuCash versions on OS X/Linux, then it has to 
> be amended.
> 
> Anyone has some insights here ?

OSX doesn't care, multiple installations can coexist quite happily because each one is self contained; OTOH, the normal installation method of dragging the app from the dmg to the Applications folder will overwrite the old app, uninstalling it.

Linux users frequently get into trouble with multiple installations, though, from picking up the wrong versions of libraries earlier on the search path than the ones that they want.  Most of them will be getting Gnucash from their distro's packager, though, which should take care of it for them.

On balance, we can probably do without the warning.

Regards,
John Ralls