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.
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