Stabilizing 2.4.0 (was Re: Announcing a new sub-project in gnucash: GUI in C++, Qt, CMake.)

[Phil Longstaff]

On Fri, 2010-03-05 at 22:14 +0100, Christian Stimming wrote:
> Am Freitag, 5. März 2010 schrieb Phil Longstaff:
> > > To give this a try, have qt4 (>=4.5.0) and cmake (>= 2.6.0) installed
> > > and:
> > >
> > >   mkdir build-cutecash
> > >   cd build-cutecash
> > >   cmake ..
> > >   make
> > >   ./src/gnc/cutecash
> > 
> > It doesn't seem able to read any of my XML files.  Oh well.
> 
> Could you try again after r18841? This could very well be due to the business 
> data types missing yesterday, but I've added them today.
> 

Yes, that fixed it.

> > I would also like to suggest that work on this take a back seat to
> > getting 2.4 out the door.  Boring, yes, but there are lots of bugs in
> > bugzilla.  Can we go through and identify which ones we would like fixed
> > by 2.4?
> 
> Sure. However, I think the actual problem looks as follows: In order to finish 
> a 2.4.0 release in finite time, we would finally have to look through those 
> features which are again and again buggy, then disable those, and call the 
> rest (which is relatively non-buggy) the next stable series. I think 
> everything else is prone to cause delay after delay again, without much fun 
> for the developers. However, decisions about which features better be disabled 
> for a stable series are never easy to do. The infamous CSV importer comes to 
> mind... Nevertheless, I will agree with and support everyone who concentrates 
> on finishing a 2.4.0 release in near future. Thanks for reminding.

Do we want to release a stable 2.4.0?  What do we need to finish to do
that.  There are lots of things happening in trunk, all of which will be
useful at some point, but many of which are destabilizing things.  I am
not immune - by adding gobject properties to some of the engine objects
and converting the sql backend to use them, I broke some things.  Note
that one reason I am doing this is to make a more general CSV importer
which can handle importing any type of object much easier to implement.
Geert is doing good work factoring out URI routines, but by moving them
around, my win32 build isn't working.  My win32 build is using the mingw
gcc 4.4.0 compiler so that I can try a webkit 1.1.22 build (built with
4.4.3) that may fix the "can't load an logo into an invoice" problem.

If it were just me and my own personal use, I'd say all of the new stuff
is great.  I can build trunk whenever I want so can wait for the dust to
settle.  For my personal use, I like the cutecash effort.  One thing I'd
like to see is a dashboard idea (page of small graphs/tables which
highlight important info) which seems to fit into cutecash (and would
probably be easier to implement).

Since I was the one who originally made the push for 2.3.X/2.4.0, I feel
some responsibility to get 2.4.0 out the door.  I'm worried that we're
fragmented and making it harder on ourselves.

Do we just put out a new 2.3.X once a month and never come to a stable
version?  Works for me for my personal stuff, but what do other people
want?

Phil