Announcement: GnuCash 2.5.10 (Unstable) Release

[John Ralls]

GnuCash 2.5.10 (Unstable) released

The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.5.10, the eleventh release in the 2.5.x series of the GnuCash Free Accounting Software. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris and Mac OSX.

WARNING: This is an UNSTABLE version of GnuCash.

This release is intended for everyone who wants 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.

This is the second "beta" release, with 2.6.0 planned for release 29 December. String and Feature Freeze are now in effect. No new features affecting strings, API, or UI should be committed until after 2.6.0 is released.

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

	• Register2 is now a configure option. Default builds, including the Windows and Mac All-in-one packages, will use only the old register. We've decided that it isn't ready for general use and the principal author doesn't have time to make it ready in time for a 2.6 release.
	• 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 Swig-2.0.10. The distribution tarballs were built with this version and should work with Guile-2.0
	• 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
	• Geert Janssens has rewritten the preferences system to use GSettings from GIO (GLib) instead of GConf. This is a simpler and more robust backend which writes to the OS's native prefs — defaults on OS X and the Registry on MSWindows — and allows us to remove several troublesome dependencies including GConf, ORBit, and DBus.

Note that window position, column sizes, and sort orders will not be migrated from GConf. Those settings will revert to the default the first time you use Gnucash 2.5.6 or later, but they will be saved once you've reset them.

	• Patrick has contributed a new feature allowing one to link an external file to a transaction. This long-requested feature is available through the Transaction menu and a transaction's context menu. The files are displayed in the default viewer for that file type.
	• 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.
	• Frédéric Perrin has contributed a change to display currency symbols whenever they are known and unambiguous.
	• By agreement of all authors we have relicensed GnuCash to the GNU General Public License Version 2 or later from just Version 2.
Changes Since the Last Unstable Release

	• Bug #336843: Attach images/files/urls to transactions: Disable the "show attachment" menu item if the transaction has no attached file.
	• Bug #619478:Build warning in html/gnc-html-webkit.c
	• Bug #627575: Stylesheet names with non-alphanumeric characters and saved-reports
	• Bug #630578: current date instead of posting date in exchange rate, when posting a bill
	• Bug #632588: Scrub doesn't fix missing currency
	• Bug #639371: Welcome Sample Report reports wrong version and has a broken report
	• Bug #653594: wrong amount printed on checks
	• Bug #705714: QIF Import - File selection pop-up is not on top during qif import.
	• Bug #708526: GnuCash Crashes when opening About page: Downgrade the error to a critical warning.
	• Bug #711317: Indian Rupee Symbol appears as "?" marks
	• Bug #715123: Post invoice problem, cannot unpost
	• Bug #719481: GnuCash report crashes with Guile2
	• Bug #719521: Missing radio button in "Edit security" dialog
	• Bug #719726: Click on File -> Open seg-faults
	• Bug #720235: Python bindings should load environment file just like gnucash does
	• Fix Python tests to no longer require gsettings schemas installed.
	• Fix the CuteCash (Qt GUI based) build
	• Multi-currency "Post invoice" improvements
	• Protect gnc_mktime against bad dates.
	• Protect against null account pointers in a couple of place to avoid asserts.
	• Qif Import Assistant: Don't disable the whole dialog, just the Forward button.
	• QifImport: Fix crash from attempting to import an empty file.
	• Add the ability to search for transactions that are, or are not, book closing entries.
	• Move customer, bill, and invoice importers form the business menu to the file menu.
	• Rename some directories in src/import-export so that the gschema.xml.in.in files within them don't have pathnames that are too long for tar when the GnuCash version exceeds 5 digits (e.g., 2.5.10).
	•
	• Translations updated: German, Italian, French
	• New Translation: Arabic
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, and while we haven't yet announced string freeze it's imminent. 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 2.5.10 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://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 from http://www.gnucash.org:

	• GnuCash 2.5.10 Win32 setup executable
	• GnuCash 2.5.10 MacOSX dmg for Intel Macs
	• GnuCash 2.5.10 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 Version 3 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.