Total Crash and Lost Data

[Donald Allen]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 11:48 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 18 January 2011 16:14, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
>> [...]
>> PS: For the record, the Alpha releases vociferously exclaim that you
>> could lose data by using them.
>>
>
> However it is also unfortunately true that for some time the principle
> download link on the home page was to the alpha version and it was not
> at all clear that it was an alpha version.  I can quite see how users
> found themselves running this thinking they had a stable release.

That conflicts with what I've seen on the website. The announcements
of the 2.3.xx series had prominent warnings, e.g., "WARNING: This is
an *UNSTABLE* version of Gnucash. This release is intended for
developers and testers who want to help tracking down all those bugs
that are still in there. Make sure you make backups of any files used
in testing versions of GnuCash in the 2.3.x series. Although the
developers go to great lengths to ensure that no data will be lost we
cannot guarantee that your data will not be affected if for some
reason GnuCash crashes in testing these releases."

And they were called "Unstable" in the title of the release! And
furthermore, the primary download link was to 2.2.9 (even for a day or
so after 2.4.0 was released). I don't see how this could have been
handled more clearly or more conservatively, to avoid someone
inadvertently running a test version in a production setting.

I'm even more surprised at the tone and imprecision of the user's
posts here after learning that Derek went out of his way to help him.

/Don

>
> Colin
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