John Ralls
2013-Nov-18 16:52 UTC
ANNOUNCE: Announcement: GnuCash 2.5.8 (Unstable) Release 2013-11-18
GnuCash 2.5.8 (Unstable) released
The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.5.8, the ninth release
in the 2.5.x series of the GnuCash Free Accounting Software which will
eventually lead to the stable version 2.6.0. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris
and Mac OSX.
WARNING: This is an UNSTABLE version of GnuCash.
This release is intended for developers and testers who want 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 final "alpha" release. The next release will be the first
release candidate, 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. Translators should begin work
immediately with this release.
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 Public
License Version 2 or later from just Version 2.
Changes Since the Last Unstable Release
Bug #707311:Tax Invoice fails to open when using guile 2
Bug #709589: make check fails with guile 2
Bug #711289: Time Zone Handling is Inconsistent between 2.4 and 2.5
Partial fix that may also correct 699997
Bug #711294: Gnucash repeatedly asks for associated income account when
importing QFX file. Patch by Kuang-che Wu
Bug #711493: Fix unselected account that is NULL
Translations updated: German
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 2.5.8 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:
GnuCash 2.5.8 Win32 setup executable
GnuCash 2.5.8 MacOSX dmg for Intel Macs
GnuCash 2.5.8 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.