Total Crash and Lost Data

[Randy Aldering]

Folks,

Thanks for all of the attention.  Regardless of how I ended up with 2.3.4, or why I had the
impression that it was a stable release, I did experience a problem.  As a result, I sought
advice, and finally found assistance through the irc site.  With the very capable and
understanding Derek on hand, I was back in business soon enough, and am now running 2.4.0 released
on 21 December 2010, fully recovered.

My apologies to any one who may have taken offense to the expression of tension and frustration in
an e-mail sent *prior* to finding out about the irc site, downloading and installing chatzilla,
getting that up and running, logging on to the gnucash irc, and finding help through that avenue.

I am very appreciative of the development work on GnuCash, and can not say "thank you" enough to
those who assisted me in recovering from what could have been a very bad situation.

Sincerely,

Randy Aldering  RHI,CHI
alderingr at housesmithe.com
269-350-4411

Veritas vos Liberabit

On Tue, January 18, 2011 12:53, Geert Janssens wrote:
| 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
|
|