Business reports questions

[John Ralls]

> On Feb 8, 2017, at 5:43 AM, Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 8 Feb 2017, Geert Janssens wrote:
> 
>> Well at some point this knowledge will certainly come in handy. Earlier
>> discussions on the future of gnucash tentatively settled on exactly one of
>> those two gui toolkits to go with the c++ rewrite.
> 
> Geert,
> 
>  I'd suggest Qt. After a decade of working with wxPython and Python2 I've
> moved to Python3 and am learning PyQt5 because it better supports Python3
> and has a more extensive widget set than does wxPython-3.0.2.0.

But we're not using Python and we're not going to. We're using C and C++ and will link the appropriate C library. Qt brings along a lot of extraneous baggage that we don't necessarily need, and suffers from the same problem that Gtk+ does: The resulting product doesn't look native except on the desktop based on it. wxWidgets uses Gtk+ for Linux so it still won't look native on a KDE desktop without dragging in a bunch of other stuff, but it uses the native toolkits on Mac and MSWindows so the result looks a lot more comfortable on those platforms. I'd hope you're not surprised to hear that MSWindows in particular has perhaps 2 orders of magnitude more users than the other two platforms combined.

Anyway, we've a ton of work to do before we can make any migration at all and barely a single full-time developer (meaning an aggregate of 2000 hours/year) working on it. Nothing is going to change any time soon except we're probably forced by WebKit1 being pulled off of the distros to convert to Gtk3. I hope it won't be too messy and we won't be forced onto Gtk4+ anytime soon.

Regards,
John Ralls