GNC-PRICES

[Rob Browning]

Dave Peticolas <dave@krondo.com> writes:

> A couple points. You only need the perl packages if you want to use
> the online stock lookup, a small part of gnucash, so making them
> either a runtime or a build-time dependency seems overly
> restrictive.

Well, IMO if they're optional, then they should probably be handled at
build time via optional tests, or via --enable-online-quotes.  Then,
if you've specifically enabled this, configure should fail with useful
info if you don't have the right bits installed.

Then at runtime, since I don't think we should ever be in the
situation of having a package that installs a script into ${PATH} that
fails with bad dependencies when run, either the quoter bits need to
be placed in a separate package (.rpm, .deb, or whatever) that depends
on the right perl bits -- if it's decided that the quoting bits are
worth being made optional, or the scripts need to be smart about
failing gracefully and printing diagnositics when the things they need
aren't available.  In either of these cases, it'll still be at
build/packaging time when some of these decisions are made.

> Also, the packages in question are the same for both the stable
> and development versions of gnucash. They are lower level net
> io libraries.

That's true now, but I was thinking long term.  What if we switch to
finance-quote-hist, or whatever, later?

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930