Gnucash 2.3.0 released

[Phil Longstaff]

	GnuCash 2.3.0 released

The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.3.0, the first 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 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 guarentee 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

	Getting GnuCash

GnuCash 2.3.0 can be downloaded from gnucash.org.  It is available as
source code.

To install GnuCash, users will need Gnome 2, guile, and slib.  Neither the 
currently used swig nor the previously used g-wrap packages are needed anymore 
when compiling from tarball or when installing a binary.

* http://www.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash/sources/unstable/2.3.x

cd401475075b3b7f490444ff45569b5a  gnucash-2.3.0.tar.bz2
afa22b610ef38cf0a367eeb17b74a292  gnucash-2.3.0.tar.gz
60bc6ab7637562274edd6850ff0d82a1  webkit-1.1.5-win32.zip

	Major changes in this release include;

* In addition to the XML backend, Gnucash can now use a SQLite3, MySQL or 
PostgreSQL database tostore 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 canuse 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.

	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 <a
href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=GnuCash">bugzilla</a>

	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.