Finally! Gnumeric 0.42 is out

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel nuclecu unam mx>]

Hello fellow primates,

   We have taken a long time to release Gnumeric 0.42, because major
changes were being done to the rendering engine of Gnumeric.  Release
0.41 was done just to clearly mark the "era change" in the internals
of the program.

   During the past few weeks the Gnumeric hackers have worked hard to
improve the user interface of Gnumeric.  Jody called this "Eye Candy
Gnumeric".  He spent weeks addressing various user interface issues. 

* Availability, source code.

	ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnumeric

* Style engine change.

	   If you are an avid Gnumeric user, you would have noticed
	that Styles did not always behave the way you wanted to.
	Basically.  We had a way too thick style granularity, which
	meant that some attributes were tied to others (ie, it was not
	possible to set only the bold attribute, we used to set the
	entire font for the cells).
	
	   Michael took on the rather complex task of revamping the
	entire way we manage styles internally, and the result is a
	cleaner setup in which we can actually render all the styles
	properly and we do what the user expects.
	
	   This work was pretty hard, as even if conceptually it is
	cleaner, many optimization tricks had to be done, and a lot of
	hard code had to be hacked.  Michael has now done all of this
	and enabled us to do a lot of nice tricks now.
	
* GUI improvements

	   Jody has worked very hard on the new Cell Format dialog
	box, which now mimics the one from Excel and has finished the
	rendering engine to support all the modes that you can
	customize.
	
	   This means we have now: border support (various border
	types, of course, and they always match the Excel ones, for
	obvious reason), patterns, foreground, background are painted
	emulating Excel.
	
	   Jody also improved our context sensitive popup to contain
	nice icons :-)

	   JP improved the sort dialog as well by switching it to
	Glade. 

	   Federico improved the dragging behaviour in the print
	preview code.
	
* New functions and fixed functions.

	* Jukka implemented IRR() and XIRR() finantial functions.

	* Jukka also fixed the database criteria functions.

	* Jukka fixed the non-numeric return values from DGET()

	* Jukka fixed one-dimmensional GROWTH() and TREND() functions.

* Improved documentation

	* Jukka improved the database documentation 

	* Jody extended the number format documentation and included
	  more figures.

* Embarassing bugs killed

	   Cells that were referenced from a series did not get
	recomputed properly, and I am the sole person to blame and
	people usually resorted to queuing a recomputation (F9 key) to
	get the proper results.
	
	   Nat and I are running our company finances on Gnumeric, so
	it was important to fix this one for a very personal reason
	:-)
	
	   It was a hard problem to track down, but the solution was
	very simple and elegant and I am very confident of the
	resulting computation engine.

* Import filters

	* We have got a basic Oleo file importer from Robert (only
	  numbers and text are currently imported).

	* We have got a Sylk file importer from Jeff Garzik

	* We can now export to CSV (Jeff again)

	* Jody fixed CSV importing (it was crashing for a few people).

	* Frank improved our summary import/export and we are pretty
	  much complete now.  He also re-structured the internals for
	  this. 

* Random things

	* Morten kept the memory leaks down and keeps helping us to
	  keep the code clean.

	* As usual, the translators have done a great work at keeping
	  Gnumeric translated to various languages.

* Pending things

	* I have been working on the graphics component.  This is not
	  finished, and it is not available on the tar file
	  distribution, you can only get this one from the CVS.
	  Looking good, but not yet deployable.

Enjoy,
miguel.