Gnucash 2.3.4 released

[Phil Longstaff]

Announcement: GnuCash 2.3.4 Release
2009-08-19 
GnuCash 2.3.4 released
The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.3.4, the
fifth of several unstable 2.3.x releases of the GnuCash Free Accounting
Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.4.0. With
this new release series, GnuCash can use an SQL database using SQLite3,
MySQL or PostgreSQL. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Microsoft
Windows and Mac OSX. This release is intended for developers and
testers who want to help tracking down all those bugs that are still in
there.

WARNING WARNING WARNING - 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.

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 2.3.x release include; 
    * In addition to the XML backend, Gnucash can now use a SQLite3,
MySQL or PostgreSQL database to store the data. This is a new
implementation using libdbi. It supports all features including the
business features. In order to build with this, add --enable-dbi to the
configure command. In addition to the libdbi-dev package for your
distribution, you will also need the appropriate DBD (libdbi driver)
package for sqlite3, mysql or postgresql.
    * In addition to the current GtkHTML HTML engine used to display
reports and graphs, Gnucash can use WebKit. WebKit is the engine used
by Google Chrome on Windows and Safari on Apple. In order to build with
this, add --enable-webkit to the configure command. You will need an
appropriate webkit-dev package. On win32, you will need to download the
webkit-1.1.5-win32.zip file from the source repository and put it into
the downloads directory of your gnucash build area.
    * Updated to AqBanking 3 on Win32.
Changes between 2.3.3 and 2.3.4 include: 
    * Changes in database schema. The "helper" tables (slots,
recurrences, taxtable_entries) which can have multiple entries per
object now have a unique, auto-increment integer primary key. Dates and
date/times stored in the database are now stored in DATE and TIMESTAMP
columns (mysql and pgsql). The "hidden" and "placeholder" account flags
are now stored in individual fields in the accounts table. A new
budget_amounts table contains 1 record per budget per account per
period and contains the budget amount for that account/period. The
scheduled transaction end date is now being stored. The versions table
now has the table name as the primary key, and NULL values are
disallowed for all fields. 

Because of these changes, you will need to delete and recreate
your database. If you want to save your data, save it to XML before
upgrading to 2.3.4, upgrade, then load the XML file and save to a new
database or over your existing database.
    * The standard report .scm files are now in /share/gnucash/guile-modules/gnucash/report/standard-reports.
When gnucash is started, it will scan this directory and load each .scm
file into the report menu system. This means that if you want to add a
new report to gnucash, you only need to copy it into this directory.
    * Updated Japanese translation
    * Updated Dutch translation
    * Updated Danish translation
    * Fixed bug 591614: Saving to postgresql causes zombie scheduled transactions.
    * Ensure template root account (used for scheduled transactions) is stored even if there are no scheduled transactions
    * Accounts can be stored even if commodity=NULL
   
* Fix bug 589418: commodities were not being stored properly.  This
should solve the problem of the disappearing commodities.
    * Improvements in the budget report: 
    1. For income accounts, the sign of the "difference" column is reversed so that positive values are good (more than budget).
    2. Fix wrapping problems in budget cells (account labels, negative values, values in certain currencies)
    3. Budget report can now display negative values in red.  This requires use of the Default-CSS stylesheet
    4. Period dates are now centered properly over the columns for that period
    5. Add an option to the budget report. If enabled, and an account does
not have a budget value for the period, the budget values for all child
accounts are added. If the chart of accounts is set up so that only
leaf accounts have transactions, this allows budget values to be
assigned either to all children and not the parent (they will be
summed) or the parent.
    * Changed --enable-webkit configure option to --with-html-engine=XXX where XXX is "gtkhtml" (default) or "webkit".
    * Merged latest pot template into all .po translation files.
    * Fixed signed vs unsigned char pointer type conflicts.
Caveats for Testers
Any 2.3.x version might crash unexpectedly at any point during
runtime. If you test some serious work in a 2.3.x release and are using
the XML file backend for data storage, make sure you hit "Save" after
every non-trivial workstep. If you are using the SQL backend, this is
not required as every change is saved immediately to the database.
The documentation has had screenshots updated, however, many
help texts usually only refers to the 1.8.x series. Everyone is invited
to help improve the documentation; see http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development on how to get involved.

How can you help?
Testing: Test it and help us discover all bugs that might show up in there.  Please enter each and every bug into bugzilla.

Translating: The new release comes with some new translation
strings. If you consider contributing a translation, we invite you to
test this release already. A string freeze will be announced in one of
the later 2.3.x releases. Please check http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Translation_Status for updates on this.

We would like to encourage people to test this and any further
releases as much as possible and submit bug reports in order that we
can polish GnuCash to be as stable as possible for the 2.4.0 release in
a few weeks. Then post any bugs you find to bugzilla

Getting GnuCash
Source code for GnuCash 2.3.4 can be downloaded from www.gnucash.org or https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/files under "gnucash
(unstable)".

To install GnuCash, users will need Gnome 2, guile, slib and swig.

http://www.gnucash.org

Win32 binary
The Gnucash 2.3.4 Win32 setup executable can be downloaded from https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/files. Look under "gnucash
(unstable)". 

About the Program
GnuCash is a free, open source accounting program released under the
GNU General Public License (GPL) 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.