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131008-announce-2.5.6.news
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131008-announce-2.5.6.news
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<b>Announcement:</b> GnuCash 2.5.6 (Unstable) Release
2013-10-08
<h2>GnuCash 2.5.6 (Unstable) released</h2>
<p>The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.5.6,
the seventh 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.</p>
<div class="dialog warning">
<p><b>WARNING:</b> This is an <b>UNSTABLE</b> version of GnuCash.</p>
<p>This release is intended for developers and testers who want to
help find bugs and other problems to make the eventual stable release
better.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
</div>
<div class="dialog note">
<p><b>NOTE:</b> The latest stable version is 2.4.13.</p>
</div>
<p><b>Please TEST, TEST, and TEST some more</b> any and all features important to you.
Then post any bugs you find to <a href="https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=GnuCash">Bugzilla</a></p>
<h3>Major changes in the 2.5 series </h3>
<ul>
<li> <p>Robert Fewell has contributed a rewrite of the register (GnuCash's
primary interface window) to use the GtkTreeModel (select "register 2"
from the menu) as well as a new CSV import/export facility for account
trees. <em>Take care not to try to open a single account in both the old and
new registers at the same time. Doing so will crash Gncuash</em></p>
<p> Note that this introduces some new preferences:</p>
<ul>
<li>
In the Accounts Pane:
<ul>
<li>Show the Account Color as background</li>
<li>Show the Account Color on tabs</li>
</ul>
These both default to "off", which means that if you have account colors on tabs in an earlier version of GnuCash, you'll want to enable the second one.
</li>
<li>In the Register Defaults Pane:
<ul>
<li>Number of characters for auto complete</li>
<li>Show entered and reconciled dates on selection</li>
<li>Show the calendar buttons</li>
<li>Move the selection to the blank split on expand</li>
</ul>
These affect the behavior of only the new Register2 windows.
</li>
</ul>
These new preferences have not yet been documented in the Help Manual.
</li>
<li> 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.</li>
<li> GnuCash now works with Guile-2.0, but enabling Guile-2.0 support
requires building GnuCash with <a
href="http://downloads.sourceforge.net/swig/swig-2.0.10.tar.gz">
Swig-2.0.10</a>. The distribution tarballs were built with this version and should work with Guile-2.0</li>
<li> The business module has been revamped and we introduce some new features:
<ul>
<li> Credit Notes </li>
<li> Customer and Vendor Overview Pages</li>
<li> Customer Overview Reports </li>
<li> Existing Transactions may be reassigned as invoice payments </li>
<li> Support for duplicate invoices </li>
<li> Improved invoice and bill handling: Post, print, or duplicate
multiple items directly from a search results list </li>
<li> Better invoice printing setup: Choose a default invoice report as a
preference </li>
<li> Reorder invoice entries in the invoice window </li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><p>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.</p>
<p><em><b>WARNING: Preferences are not completely migrated
from GConf</b></em> <br/>Some preferences are not yet
migrated. What's more, the migration occurs every time you
start up, over-writing anything that you've changed, so you
may want to move ~/.gconf aside after the first time you run
GnuCash-2.5.6. You can move it back when you need to use
2.4.13 for real work.</p> </li>
<li> The "Num" field is now optionally per-split rather than
per-transaction.</li>
<li> GnuCash can print to a PDF for reports and invoices </li>
<li> Account "Filter By" settings can be saved and recalled </li>
<li> Account entries in the Chart of Account can be colored </li>
<li> 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.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li> GnuCash is no longer subject to the "2038" bug, so that 30-year
mortgages can now be entered correctly.</li>
<li> By agreement of all authors we have relicensed GnuCash to the Gnu
Public License Version 2 or later from just Version 2.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Changes Since the Last Unstable Release</h3>
<ul>
<li> <a href="https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=632362">Bug
#63362</a>: Unable to create "reversing transaction" again
after it is removed with the SQL backend. </li>
<li> <a href="https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=654196">Bug
#654196</a>: "Make check" fails when built with --enable-dbi and no
dbi backends are installed. Now fails in configure, as it
should. </li>
<li> <a href="https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674862">Bug
#674862</a>: 2038 Bug with Postgres and MySql backends. </li>
<li> <a href="https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=682280">Bug
#682280</a>: Bill/Invoice importer fails to save the imported item to
the SQL backend. </li>
<li> <a href="https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=684670">Bug
#684670</a>: Interest amount calculation is wrong in SQL backend. The
backend wasn't storing the already-elapsed periods. </li>
<li> <a href="https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=699450">Bug
#699450</a>: New budgets cause Account Name column to expand until
display bigger than screen. – Robert Ratliff </li>
<li> <a href="https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=708700">Bug
#708700</a>: Make check fails from missing glib bits – Frédéric Perrin </li>
<li> Translations updated: Dutch</li>
</ul>
<h3>Caveats for Testers</h3>
<p><b>Any 2.5.x version might crash unexpectedly.</b> 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.</p>
<p>Although the screenshots have been updated in the documentation,
much of the wording still describes GnuCash-2.4. Please help update
the documentation: See <a
href="http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development">the development wiki
page</a> on how to get involved.</p>
<h3>How can you help?</h3>
<ul>
<li><b>Testing:</b> Please try out as many features as you can. Report
problems either in <a
href="https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=GnuCash">bug
reports</a>or on the <a
href="https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel">devel
mailing list</a></li>
<li><b>Translating:</b> Translators may begin work on new strings at any time,
though string freeze isn't planned until the 2.5.6 release in early
September. Status of translations is shown on the <a
href="http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Translation_Status">translation
status </a> page. If GnuCash isn't fully translated into your language
and you'd like to pitch in, <a
href="http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Translation">here's how to get
involved</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Getting GnuCash</h3>
<p>Source code for GnuCash 2.5.6 can be downloaded from multiple locations:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.gnucash.org/download.phtml">The GnuCash website</a></li>
<li>Sourceforge: <a href="http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gnucash/gnucash-2.5.6.tar.bz2">bzip2</a>,
<a href="http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gnucash/gnucash-2.5.6.tar.gz">gzip</a>,
<a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/files/gnucash%20(unstable)/2.5.6/">all
files</a>.</li>
<li>You can also checkout the sources directly from the
repository with subversion:<br/><br/><span style="font-family:
monospace;">svn co http://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/trunk
gnucash</span>
<p>Or with git:</p><span style="font-family:
monospace;">git clone git://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash.git</span></li>
</ul>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Win32 and MacOSX binary</h3>
<p>The following pre-compiled application packages are also available:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gnucash/unstable/gnucash-2.5.6-setup.exe">GnuCash 2.5.6 Win32 setup executable</a></li>
<li><a href="http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gnucash/unstable/gnucash-Intel-2.5.6.dmg">GnuCash 2.5.6 MacOSX dmg for Intel Macs</a></li>
<li><a href="http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gnucash/unstable/gnucash-PPC-2.5.6.dmg">GnuCash 2.5.6 MacOSX dmg for PowerPC Macs</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>About the Program</h3>
<p>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.</p>