[Gnue-announce] Pre-releases for 0.5.0 available for testing

[Jason Cater]

Very soon, we will have a 0.5.0 release for Forms and Designer, as well as
a minor 0.4.4 release for Common.  Before the final release, we encourage
everyone to test the new prereleases from: 

  http://www.gnuenterprise.org/downloads/prereleases.php

Forms and Designer 0.5.0 will introduce many changes and improvements. The
0.5.0 release is mainly intended to get the new features out into
developers' hands. 0.5.0 isn't intended for production use, although it
does appear stable in situations where we've used it. 

Please note that the 0.5.0 Forms file format (.gfd) is not compatable with
the previous versions. However, there is a utility in the Forms tarball --
utils/gfd04to05.py -- that can convert an older form to the new version.
It can be run as:

  python gfd04to05.py myform.gfd [destform.gfd]

If destform.gfd is not specified, then myform.gfd is backed up and is
overwritten by the new format. Please note that this is a one-way
conversion. We have no way of converting a form from 0.5.0 to 0.4.x. 

This script will handle the vast majority of definition changes. For the
most part, the only changes it will not be able to handle are complex
python trigger code. There's a good chance your forms can be converted
with this script without any intervention on your part.  All of the sample
forms in the cvs tree were converted successfully by only using this
script. 

We do not take changing the GFD format very lightly. However, these are
changes we have wanted to make for quite some time now. We felt that the
closer we get to Forms 1.0, the more stable the GFD must become.  If we
were going to perform any specification cleanup, we needed to do it sooner
than later.

--
Jason Cater <address@hidden>