Timeline and goals for Gnucash v 2.8

[Geert Janssens]

On donderdag 3 augustus 2017 17:42:29 CEST John Ralls wrote:
> > 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

Adding to this here's what I still have on my todo for 2.8 (not necessarily in 
that order):

1. Reshuffle the directory structure of our sources. I have started a branch 
and I'm almost finished folding the remaining business subdirectories into the 
register and gnome directories respectively. I also want to fold qof back into 
the engine (the split off into an independent library hasn't worked out so I 
don't see a reason to keep it separated still. I'd like to do even more, but 
will talk about that in a separate mail as it requires some discussion.

2. A fix for https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=503722 (moving 
.gnucash to a proper location supported by the freedesktop spec). Aside from 
simply using another location, some migration code should be written to copy 
anything existing in .gnucash to the new directory.

3. clean ups in all major code changes I did for 2.8 (csv importer, register/
gtk3). The csv importer for example needs a lot more unit testing.

4. If time permits fix building of the gnucash libs without gui. This should 
be a small one but can be very helpful in the context of the (python)bindings.

And right now I'm tweaking cmake/autotools to have them generate the same 
POTFILES output. As things are now they use different sorting alghorithms so 
I'm seeing a lot of noise in commits when switching between the two build 
environments.

Geert