Total Crash and Lost Data

[Geert Janssens]

On Tuesday 18 January 2011, Donald Allen wrote:
> 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."
> 
Colin is right. The announcements for early 2.3.x development releases weren't 
very clear on this. At some point I improved on this, but it is indeed 
possible a user might have been confused by the early annoucements.

> 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.
> 
At that time there was no primary download link yet on the website as there is 
now. I have added that around the same time I improved the announcements.

> 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.
> 
...unless that mail was sent before the user got help from Derek. As I said , 
the mail was delayed (I suppose it was stuck in the moderator queue).

Geert