German online banking users asking for 2.5.x very soon

[Geert Janssens]

Op maandag 5 december 2011 10:26:45 schreef Christian Stimming:
> 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
> 
I'm roughly ok with the timing, although I would prefer the first unstable 
release one week later.

My work currently focusses on the credit notes feature, which I really would 
want to get into 2.6, due to the data model change required. Considering my 
KVP proposal is not sufficiently resilient to potential data loss, I'll have 
to rewrite the save-load code to use a real xml element/database field. I'm 
not sure I can manage that by Sunday 11th, but probably I can make it by the 
18th.

> 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
> 
 - Support for credit notes

Non-user-visible feature I would like to see tackled in 2.6:
- fix guile 2.0 compatibility problems (I'm still investigating)
Many distros start pushing guile 2.0: OpenSuse, Ubuntu,... (Fedora slipped it 
until F17). Our current code has some problems with it and I don't expect the 
2.7 release in another year or so.
- conversion of libglade to gtkbuilder
I would estimate this one to be 90% finished.

But neither of these have to be done before 2.5, only by 2.6 in my opinion.

> What do you think?
> 
Other work I'm involved in can wait. So I'm in favour of working towards a new 
major release.

Geert