Announcement: GnuCash 2.3.17 (RC2) Release 2010-11-21
GnuCash 2.3.17 (RC2) released
The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.3.17, the
eighteenth of several 2.3.x releases of the GnuCash Free Accounting
Software and second release candidate for 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.
WARNING: This is a release candidate version of Gnucash.
This release is intended for developers and testers who want to verify
that bugs found during development have been fixed and that the software
is stable enough to be released as 2.4.0.
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.
WARNING: You should uninstall any earlier GnuCash version from your
system prior to installing 2.3.17.
Failing to do so may result in startup errors. In particular on Windows
this may cause "Parse error: entry point not found" errors.
NOTE: The latest stable version is 2.2.9.
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.
* As a replacement for 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-1.1.90-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.
Strings are frozen. This means no new changes will be introduced which
change any text displayed by Gnucash. Therefore, final translations for
2.4.0 release may begin.
Changes between 2.3.16 and 2.3.17 include:
* Bugs fixed
* Bug #589954: No blank split after creating a new account
"on the fly" while editing a transaction. Cause was
that
gnc_split_register_get_account_by_name() turned of
"full_refresh" if the account didn't already exist
and
turned it back on only if the name of the account
actually created in the new account dialog box differed
from the one originally entered in the transaction.
Since "full_refresh" isn't manipulated much, that
effectively shut down the ledger for further editing.
Probably not what the original author intended!
* Bug #634906 - Re-enable splash screen preference option
* Bug #633550 - Help and concepts guide are missing from
the prebuilt binary (because xsltproc chokes on
undefined entities)
* Bug #609581 - Gnucash 2.3.8 offers to create db and then
fails to do so
* Bug 628409: SQL coerces identifiers to lowercase, but
postgres's C interface is case sensitive.
* Bug 592643: Set standard_conforming_strings on
postgresql databases.
* Bug 634964: Crash in pgsql_error_fn. The dbi_conn isn't
set if the server refuses the connection, so protect
dereferences from null pointers.
* Bug #634357 followup: convert New and Open submenus into
plain menus
* Bug #634812: Improve backend error reporting for Session
begin Patch by Mike E: The current error feedback to a
python scrpt/user looks something like: call to begin
resulted in the following errors, (7,) This change in
gnucash_core.py makes the feedback similar to: call to
begin resulted in the following errors,
ERR_BACKEND_LOCKED This is less cryptic and aid
debugging of user python scripts. My only issue though
is whether this would break existing user scripts where
checking of this error code is used for flow control.
Although since the ERR_ codes are imported with
gnucash_core_c it *should* have no effect.
* Bug #634357: Further menu ui cleanup: Reserve File
New/Open menu only the file-related items anymore. The
menu items under "File" should relate only to the file
(database), not to anything within a file. The open/new
for all other things (budget, invoice, account) have
been moved somewhere else.
* Minor fix of r19802, bug#634673: config.h is in
builddir, not srcdir; add last .i file dependency.
* Bug 634673: Add dependency information & fix typo in
python-bindings Makefile.
* Bug 634392: New sql database raises clobber warning A
fairly extensive change, because I changed may_clobber
from a global qof function (which passed through
qofbackend and fetched up in the actual backends) to a
local static in the individual backends which raise a
new qof_backend_error, QOF_ABCKEND_STORE_EXISTS. This
was necessary to reorder the existence check before the
lock, because with the sql backends, locking creates the
database... which then would return may_clobber as true,
even though it really wasn't. New parameter
"force"
added to session_begin() functions, and
"create_if_nonexistant" is renamed to simply
"create".
The reason for the latter is that the file/database is
created regardless of whether it already exists; that's
what the clobber check is about. The new "force"
parameter is set to true the second time through, after
the user has responded to the clobber dialog indicating
that the data should be destroyed. Many of the
extraneous changes are just adding the new parameter to
the session_begin() calls. gnc-file changes to handle
the error in favor of calling the no-longer-existing
qof_check_may_clobber_data() call after session_begin().
Two minor changes to gnc_file_do_save_as:
gnc_add_history and gnc_hook_run are now called on
new_session instead of old_session; this ensures that
the new file/database is used at the next startup of
gnucash. Second, the filename/url is filtered before
displaying the "may_clobber" dialog box to prevent
displaying plaintext database passwords.
* Bug #634165: Better dealing with a locked database in
python Patch by Christoph Holtermann: For the second
enhancement proposal i have attached a simple patch
which adds the argument ignore_lock to
Session.__init__() which is passed through to
qof_session_begin. This patch extends the function
Session.__init__() with ignore_lock
* Bug #634357: Move the Budget Open/New menu items to
Actions -> Budget -> New Budget / Open Budget because
they have nothing to do with the file menu.
* Bug 634334: Check that subdir argument really is one of
the two cases we can handle. Wrap fileURLWithPath in
@try/@catch so that we don't crash when it throws. Free
bonus fix: If "en" is the language and doesn't
have a
translation, force the C locale.
* Bug 634334: Crash on selecting New User Tutorial from
new user dialog.
* Bug #633942: Fix "nil" column header on single account
report When I open a report window (barchart in the
example) and select only one account, I get a column
header saying "nil" near the only data column. Someone
accidentally wrote "nil" instead of the empty list
'().
* Bug #634252: Re-enable the splash screen if the user
selects open anyway If during startup a file or database
turns out to beeing locked the user is presented a
dialog with the options to open anyway, create a new
file or abort. This dialog, however, closes the splash
screen. This may cause confusion, because file loading
and report generation may still take quite some time.
Patch by Herbert Thoma.
* Updated translations or translation-related changes
* Updated Italian Translation.
* Updated dutch translation, copied from Translation
Project
* Minor update of German translation. In the "bills due"
dialog we use Bill -> Rechnung, not Lieferantenrechnung.
* Other user-visible changes
* Fix crash when using the function "Import DTAUS and
send". The actual function is still implemented, though.
* Other code/build changes
* Correct patch submission instructions to direct patches
to bugzilla rather than the mailing list.
* Splash screen: minor code cleanup
* Fix error in r19822 which prevented creation of postgres
databases.
* Fix python samples to work with reordered
Session.__init__() args
* Fixed aqbanking transaction type on importing DTAUS
online transfers. Patch by Manfred Usselmann.
* Disable Italian docs generation I just accidentally
enabled. It wasn't enabled before the xsltproc issue
popped up, so it shouldn't be enabled now.
* Reactivate English docs generation in Windows build
* When preparing imported DTAUS jobs, check their
availability as well.
* Fix misplaced comment in gnome-utls/gnome-file.c from
19798
* Make arguments to Session.__init__() have the same order
as to qof_session_begin() to reduce potential confusion.
* Fix typo in AUTHORS, as pointed out by Mike himself.
* Add Mike Evans to AUTHORS as he has been providing
patches regularly.
* Win32 build: Update versions of libktoblzcheck,
gwenhywfar4.
* Add force_new parameter to GnuCashCoreClass.__init__,
reflecting change to qof_session_begin() in r19798
* Increase gnutls version to 2.8.6 (might fix bug#632158)
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 2.3.17 can be downloaded from multiple
locations:
* The GnuCash website
* Sourceforge: bzip2, gzip, all files.
* You can also checkout the sources directly from the subversion
repository with this command:
svn co http://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/trunk gnucash
To install GnuCash, you will need Gnome 2, guile, slib. In addition you
will need swig if compiling from subversion.
Win32 binary
The Gnucash 2.3.17 Win32 setup executable can be downloaded from
Sourceforge as well.
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.