Announcement: GnuCash 2.5.3 (Unstable) Release

[John Ralls]

GnuCash 2.5.3 (Unstable) released

The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.5.3, the fourth release in the 2.5.x series of the GnuCash Free Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.6.0. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris and Mac OSX.

WARNING: This is an UNSTABLE version of Gnucash.

This release is intended for developers and testers who want to help find bugs and other problems to make the eventual stable release better.

Make sure you make backups of any files used in testing versions of GnuCash in the 2.5.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.

NOTE: The latest stable version is 2.4.13.

PLEASE TEST TEST AND TEST SOME MORE any and all features important to you. Then post any bugs you find to bugzilla

Major changes in the 2.5 series

	• Robert Fewell has contributed a rewrite of the register (Gnucash's primary interface window) to use the GtkTreeModel (select "register 2" from the menu) as well as a new CSV import/export facility for account trees.Take care not to try to open a single account in both the old and new registers at the same time. Doing so will crash Gncuash
	• Gnucash now requires Gtk+-2.24 and GLib-2.26. We've removed most of the dependencies on libraries obsoleted by project Ridley and will be in position to move to Gtk+-3.x once the GtkTreeModel register window work is complete. This means that Gnucash 2.5 requires Debian 6, RHEL 6, or one of the more aggressive distributions like Ubuntu.
	• Gnucash now works with Guile-2.0, but enabling Guile-2.0 support requires building Gnucash with the just-released (as in yesterday) Swig-2.0.10, which missed our deadline for this release. Consequently the Gnucash-2.5.3 tarballs do not work with Guile-2.0. If you need Guile-2.0 support you will have to build Gnucash-2.5.3 from the repo after installing Swig-2.0.10 on your system
	• The business module has been revamped and we introduce some new features:
		• Credit Notes
		• Customer and Vendor Overview Pages
		• Customer Overview Reports
		• Existing Transactions may be reassigned as invoice payments
		• Support for duplicate invoices
		• Improved invoice and bill handling: Post, print, or duplicate multiple items directly from a search results list
		• Better invoice printing setup: Choose a default invoice report as a preference
		• Reorder invoice entries in the invoice window
	• The "Num" field is now optionally per-split rather than per-transaction.
	• Gnucash can print to a PDF for reports and invoices
	• Account "Filter By" settings can be saved and recalled
	• Account entries in the Chart of Account can be colored
	• When opening a locked "book" one now has the option of opening it read-only. Note that Gnucash is still a single-user program and that the database backends are still used only as a data store.
	• Tom Loft has contributed an initial version of REST API allowing minimal information about accounts, invoices and customers to be accessed in JSON format. Includes modifications to gnucash_core.py to add additional functions.
	• Gnucash is no longer subject to the "2038" bug, so that 30-year mortgages can now be entered correctly.
	• By agreement of all authors we have relicensed Gnucash to the Gnu Public License Version 2 or later from just Version 2.
Changes Since the Last Unstable Release

	• Register Rewrite Update:
		• Better commodity/currency handling
		• Sanity checks when converting TreePaths
		• Posted dates now work like old register
		• Enable online actions in Register2
Author: Robert Fewell
	• Customized report settings have been redesigned so that it's no longer necessary to change the report's name to save it, multiple versions of the same report can be saved (the names are automatically numbered) using Save As, and saved reports can be easily updated by clicking Save.

Author: Geert Jansens

	• Faster versions of several reports by Peter Broadberry
	• It's now possible to post multiple invoices from the find dialog. GnuCash was crashing if you searched for all unposted invoices, selected two or more of them, and posted them. This was because the list of invoices to be posted changed while it was being processed. As part of fixing this the prompt for post date, due date, etc. will only be given once, not once per invoice.
	• One can now reorder un-numbered transactions within a date by drag and drop or with arrow keys.
	• Bug #703272 list of windows in OSX Windows menu
	• Bug #699686 Startup dialog windows should be top level (Simon Arlot)
	• Bug #701670 (OSX)Command-V in reconcile window pastes data in register
	• Bug #702899 Fix crash in scrubbing code
	• Bug #703305 Fix crash on entering a non-valid date
	• Bug #691587 Catch scheme exceptions when converting error messages
	• Bug #669964 Fix txn creation that forgot to set a txn currency
	• Bug #672595 After creation of a new book, make sure to set it to dirt
	• Bug #700582
	• Translations updated: Danish, Italian, German
Caveats for Testers

Any 2.5.x version might crash unexpectedly. If you must test with important data in a 2.5.x release and are using the XML file backend for data storage, be sure to save the file frequently. If you are using the SQL backend, this is not required as every change is saved immediately to the database.

Although the screenshots have been updated in the documentation, much of the wording still describes Gnucash-2.4. Please help update the documentation: See the development wiki page on how to get involved.

How can you help?

	• Testing: Please try out as many features as you can. Report problems either in bug reportsor on the devel mailing list
	• Translating: Translators may begin work on new strings at any time, though string freeze isn't planned until the 2.5.5 release in early September. Status of translations is shown on the translation status page. If Gnucash isn't fully translated into your language and you'd like to pitch in, here's how to get involved.
Getting GnuCash

Source code for GnuCash 2.5.3 can be downloaded from multiple locations:

	• The GnuCash website
	• Sourceforge: bzip2, gzip, all files.
	• You can also checkout the sources directly from the repository with subversion:

svn co http://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/trunk gnucash
Or with git:

git clone git at github.com:Gnucash/gnucash.git
To install GnuCash, you will need Gnome 2 and guile 1.8 or 2.0, including devel packages. In addition you will need swig (swig-2.0.10 for guile 2.0, see the note at the top) if compiling from subversion or git.

Win32 and MacOSX binary

The following pre-compiled application packages are also available:

	• Gnucash 2.5.3 Win32 setup executable
	• Gnucash 2.5.3 MacOSX dmg for Intel Macs
	• Gnucash 2.5.3 MacOSX dmg for PowerPC Macs
About the Program

GnuCash is a free, open source accounting program released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 2 or later and available for GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Mac OSX and Microsoft Windows. Programming on GnuCash began in 1997, and its first stable release was in 1998.