Difference between revisions of "Main page"

Version 4.0.0, the "The Miracle of Birth", has been released. This is a major release, don't upgrade before verifying your system can run it.

As one of the very first big ($5.4 million), multi-platform (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, ...), non-Gnome GTK applications, Gramps makes the jump to GTK 3. At the same time python 2.7 and python 3 are supported, though the last must still be considered experimental. Gramps 4.0 further uses distutils for distribution, so the install sequence is changed.

The Gramps developers have tried to make Gramps 4.0 as identical as possible to 3.4, so no data changes are done, nor are there big interface changes. In other words, a .gramps backup file of version 4.0 will open without problems in Gramps 3.4, giving users the possibility to fully try Gramps 4.0.

Don't be mistaken though, a huge amount of code is new and changed! In order to bring this release we thank the many developers who helped the GTK support on Mac, Windows and Linux forward. Note however, Gramps 4.0 will only work on a top of a very recent sortware stack. A Windows installer will probably not be available soon. In Linux current distro's don't contain the optional packages in the form Gramps 4.0 needs. All this should make clear you can safely keep using version 3.4 and wait for packagers to catch up. People who cannot upgrade the required components but want to use Gramps 4.0 should use it in Virtualbox.

Before Upgrade

Before you upgrade, make sure your family tree data is secure. The best way to do this is:

1. Start Gramps 3.4
2. Open your family tree
3. Export the family tree to the gramps xml format or the gramps xml package format (which includes your photographs and other media files associated with your family tree data). Export your tree via menu Family Trees->Backup....
4. Close this family tree and repeat the above steps for any other family trees you have
5. Keep the resulting file(s) in a safe place

Overview of big changes

• Conversion to GTK 3 and use of gobject introspection, GEPS 029
• Support for python 3, GEPS 031
• Code reorganization, GEPS 008
• Autotools is no longer used for building Gramps, distutils is used, GEPS 026
• Completely reworked localization handling

Overview of visible changes

See screenshots.

• The Gramplet view has been renamed Dashboard. This to avoid an overload of the word Gramplet, and to make it more clear to new users what can be expected in this view
• GTK 3 uses new themes, so users not on Gnome must set a nice GTK 3 theme to fully appreciate Gramps 4.0. Install a GTK 3 theme and set it. If Gramps looks ugly, you made an error in this step.
• Different sidebar navigators can be installed
• New Ancestor Fan Chart View and Descendant Fan Chart View, which offer a lot of insight in your family tree on a small space. Direct printing is available from these views.
• All wizards are reworked, so the exporter dialog, help and bug report dialog are different from version 3.4, but offer the same functions
• New To Do Gramplets listing all To Do Notes
• More reports support output in a different language than the interface language
• Narrative Web has been reworked to make it more stable.

Installation status

1. OS X: Mac OS X will see an official installer shortly after release with all components
2. Linux: We expect Linux packages for different distributions. Gramps 4.0 will only work on distributions released since October 2012, use virtualbox for older distributions. Some optional dependencies are not available yet on most distribution at the time of release. If you want those, you need to install them from source, see Ubuntu derivatives walkthrough in the installation guide for these. Specifically for Ubuntu derivatives spell checking, geography view and exiv image data require installation of source components.
3. Windows: Much work has been done the last months to obtain the stack needed for Gramps on Windows. At the moment only a rough guide on source installation is present. We hope this will allow windows developers to construct an AIO installer as for the 3.4 version

In order to fix some bugs introduced in 3.4.3 and to prepare for the imminent release of version 4.0.0, the Gramps team releases version 3.4.4.

We advise everybody on 3.x versions to upgrade to this latest and most stable of Gramps versions.

For all users on Linux versions older than October 2012, the 3.4 releases will be the last versions of Gramps that can be easily installed. Therefore, bug fixes will continue for the 3.4 series for at least another year.

Most important changes:

• 6515 infinite recursion bug in narrative web generation

• protection on family trees when using version 3.4 and 4.0 on the same PC (road to 4.0)

• merging notes of media with citations now works

• 6493: crash during Calculate Preview of a filtered XML export

• fix annoying errors on navigation related to citations gramplet and tag object.

• 6483: listing the Family Trees can corrupt them.

Other changes are:

• various fix around handling Gedcom file format
• fix citations and sources import on ProGen format
• better date handling and better alternate translation support on some textual reports according to locale under windows
• avoid Errors when setting wrong value as markup for invalid dates (Preferences)
• fix paragraph layout on PDF format or print output
• New: New-Zealand holidays
• Polish and backport code on XML import (road to 4.0)
• Regular expression rules now use search rather than match, fix design issues on regex filter rules
• Disable/Enable indent spouse on descendants tree
• fix regular expressions on Place filter rule
• consistency on cli arguments (road to 4.0)
• fix call of non-existant process on references proxy, enhanced tests on proxy filter
• fix NarWeb creation via cli for some non-english locales
• Various updated translations: ca, de, fr, it, nl, pt_BR, ru, sv, uk