Difference between revisions of "Announcement 2.1.0"

Revision as of 11:56, 17 April 2007

This is a draft!

The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.1.0 aka "...", the first 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.

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</li>

(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 2.1.0?

This is a draft!

• There are only very few new user-visible features, except for the completed port to the Microsoft Windows operating system. Other new features since the 2.0.x series are
  • Improved Scheduled Transaction editor and management dialogs (FIXME: make this more precise and make this sound more exciting)
  • 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

• Major bugfixes since the 2.0.x series include
  • GtkPrint integrated (FIXME: explain whether this fixed a bug, otherwise advertise this as new feature)
  • FIXME: how can we look these up in bugzilla?
    • 2.1.x-targeted bugs

• 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.

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?

• Testing: Test it and help us discover all bugs that might show up in there. Please enter each and every bug into bugzilla at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=GnuCash
• 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.

Press coverage

Interestingly enough even this small test release got some press coverage; all of them mention "Gnucash supports Windows" as headline of the articles.

In German:

• http://www.pro-linux.de/news/2007/11088.html
• http://www.golem.de/0704/51714.html