Negative number problems

[Dave Peticolas]

Matthew Vanecek writes:
> Hi,
> 1.4.8 doesn't seem to like negative numbers. Two problems I'm having:
> 
> 1) I created a new credit card account.  The balance of course starts at
> zero and decreases from there.  The first transaction I entered was a
> debit of $21.  The reported balance appeared as 0.06.  It should have
> showed (21.00).  Further transactions display similar oddities.  The
> balance in the main window seems to be correct.  Just the Register is
> weird.
> 
> 2) I went to reconcile one of my checking accounts.  On paper it had a
> -1.84 ending balance.  So I dutifully enter -1.84 as the ending balance,
> and tab on, and the figure is converted to (1.84).  All seems well. 
> When I click OK, and get to the reconcile window, the ending balance is
> incorrectly reported as 0.08.  This caused my final balance to be off. 
> No matter what I did, I could not get a negative ending balance to
> work.  This is very disturbing, especially since I need to reconcile my
> credit card accounts, and all of those naturally have a negative
> balance.  When I try to enter the negative ending balance, and tab out
> of the field, the amount is summarily converted to 0.
> 
> What can I do to fix this?  I didn't have this problem in previous
> versions.  Should I downgrade to a previous version (the last one I used
> was Helix's release of it)? 
> 
> I'm currently using RH 7.0, and the GNUCash 1.4.8 RPM from gnucash.org.

You're running in the C locale, right? There is a bug with amount printing
and the C locale (exposed by RH 7.0 which has different defaults for the
C locale than previous RH versions). Short term fix: switch to another
locale, i.e., LANG=en_US gnucash, as appropriate.

The next stable version will fix this problem.

dave