German online banking users asking for 2.5.x very soon

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.us
Mon Dec 5 10:17:49 EST 2011


On Dec 5, 2011, at 1:26 AM, Christian Stimming wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> the German online banking (HBCI) users are facing a major version upgrade in many online banking servers, which requires an update on the client side as well (i.e. an updated libaqbanking). However, our gnucash 2.4 branch and in particular its Windows build is locked on some older aqbanking version due to its older gtk version setup. In order to continue online banking support, those users need either a 2.4.x windows build with newer gtk (>= 2.20), or we need to branch off  a new stable series 2.5.x/2.6.x rather soon.
> 
> As 2.4.0 is now 12 months old, I'd rather prefer to have a new stable branch started very soon. There is some ongoing work on trunk, but this isn't a problem: New testing code is orthogonal to a new release, and new features which happen to be not yet stable can still be disabled in the stable branch.
> 
> It is not a solution to point those users to trunk versions, especially due to the incomplete translations in trunk. Hence, if we think we can call trunk "stable enough", we consequently should branch off a new stable branch from the current status.
> 
> And indeed I believe current trunk to be rather stable in terms of the code base. There haven't been any newly discovered serious errors in the main code for quite some time. We should make good use of this stability, branch off a new stable branch so that it can get translated, and continue the main development on a new trunk rather soon.
> 
> Potential timeline:
> - 2.5.0 unstable release within the next 1-2 weeks (e.g. Sunday 11th) with a call for translation
> - Additional 2.5.x unstable releases every two weeks
> - Branch off a 2.6 branch at release 2.5.2 or 2.5.3 so that trunk is allowed to be unstable again
> - Add another 2.5.x unstable releases
> - Have 2.6.0 in February or March
> 
> Major new user-visible features:
> - Windows: Using new gtk version
> - Updated online banking for German banks (HBCI)
> - Very large number of bugfixes
> - Customer / Vendor overview pages
> - Customer overview reports
> - ... please insert your favorite new feature here
> 
> What do you think?

I have no real opinion about starting a new release series, but to do so just to get the latest versions of Gtk and AQBanking on MSWin makes no sense. I've been shipping OSX bundles with Gtk-2.24 and AQBanking 5 for the whole run of Gnucash 2.4;
I don't know what the Linux distros are doing, but I bet that Ubuntu 1110 and Fedora 17 both also provide recent versions of both -- and in any case Gnucash's release number isn't going to change what Gtk and AQB versions a distro provides.

In other words, AQB and Gtk versions are completely unrelated to Gnucash version, so if Win32 needs Gtk-2.24 and AQB 5, make a Windows package with those, put it on SF, and write up a "news item" for the website. You could do that today, no Gnucash version changes needed (but if you want to snap off a 2.4.9 this weekend we could do that -- it's about time for a
new release).

Regards,
John Ralls




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