Difference between revisions of "Announcement 2.1.1"

Revision as of 09:05, 27 April 2007

This is a draft!

GnuCash 2.1.1 released

The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.1.1 aka "Bug-begone", the second of several unstable 2.1.x releases of the GnuCash Open Source Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.2.0. With this new release series, GnuCash is available on Microsoft Windows for the first time, and it also 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: Make sure you make backups of any files used in testing versions of GnuCash in the 2.1.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 any and all features important to you. Then post any bugs you find to http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=GnuCash

Download:

• http://www.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash/sources/unstable/2.1.x/ (EDITORIAL NOTE: Please keep the *full* URL here, not only the part to pub/gnucash/, because people are annoyed by having to search for the correct path)
• http://download.sourceforge.net/gnucash

(EDITORIAL NOTE: Please keep the download links here at the top because people are annoyed when having to scroll down multiple pages until they see the download link. They can be duplicated at the end, though.)

What's New in GnuCash 2.1.1?

This is a draft!

Compared to the 2.0.x series, there are only very few user-visible new features, except for the completed port to the Microsoft Windows operating system. Minor new features compared to the 2.0.x series are

• The Scheduled Transaction Editor and Management dialogs have been integrated into the overall GnuCash User Interface to give the user a more consistent experience in creating scheduled transactions.
• Internally, the programming language wrappers are no longer being generated by the not-so-well-maintained package "g-wrap" but instead by the well-established wrapper generator "SWIG". In effect, gnucash does no longer depend on g-wrap anymore but uses SWIG now.
• New printing formats for check printing
• FIXME: Add some more here

Bugfixes and improvements since the last version 2.1.0 include:

• Start-up behaviour has been improved: Windows size is better, splash screen can be clicked away
• OFX DirectConnect import uses correct ID fields for transaction matching
• More Scheduled Transactions bugs have been fixed
• Many bugs in the Windows port have been fixed, including reading/writing to compressed data files

(EDITORIAL NOTE: To check the milestone-targeted lists in bugzilla: see milestone-2.1.0, see milestone-2.1.1 )

Caveats for testers:

• Any 2.1.x version might crash unexpectedly at any point during runtime. If you test some serious work in a 2.1.x release, make sure you hit "Save" after ever non-trivial workstep.
• 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?

• 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 2.2.0 release in a few weeks. Then post any bugs you find to bugzilla http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=GnuCash
• If you have the urge to help beyond testing please get involved in the discussions on the GnuCash mailing lists which you will find at http://www.gnucash.org. We especially need people to help with updating the documentation. Please see http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development on how to get involved.
• 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 2.1.x releases. Please check http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Translation_Status for updates on this.

Getting GnuCash

GnuCash 2.1.1 can be downloaded from gnucash.org or sourceforge.net. It is available as source code. For the Microsoft Windows operating system, a self-installing setup program is available which includes all necessary additional libraries.

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 when compiling from tarball or when installing a binary.

• http://download.sourceforge.net/gnucash
• http://www.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash/sources/unstable/2.1.x/

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. It is collaboratively developed by 12 people from over 5 countries.

Programming on GnuCash began in 1997, and its first stable release was in 1998.