Timeline and goals for Gnucash v 2.8

[John Ralls]

> On Aug 3, 2017, at 7:43 AM, Sumit Bhardwaj <bhardwajs at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello Devels,
> 
> I have been following the threads for last few months and trying to get a
> sense of the timeline and what will be part of Gnucash 2.8 and I don't have
> a good sense. On IRC, John asked to email the DL so we can reach a
> conclusion.
> 
> My personal interest in getting the clarity is to see how best I can
> contribute.

Sumit,

What's going into 2.8 is what's in master now, cleaned up and made ready for release. We're still open to new feature contributions but I think that the core devs will be focusing on getting what's in there now polished up for release. For 2.6 we ran a 6-month alpha-beta release cycle, beginning in July and culminating with the 2.6.0 release the last week of December. We're not ready to do that first alpha release.

The switch to Gtk3/Webkit4gtk3 led us to switch the Windows build system to mingw64 from vanilla mingw because the former has many of our dependencies already built. I've gotten it working on my local Windows VM and installed it in the "official" windows VM that Derek hosts, where it hung. We obviously need to be able to build Windows installers reliably before we can start alpha releases.

I know of two other problems: The SQL backend has a serious memory leak that causes it to run out of memory and crash on large books and https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=782144 <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=782144>, corrupted data on save. IMO both of those need to be resolved before we do a release.

Regards,
John Ralls