word change requested for "to scrub"

Christian Stimming stimming@tuhh.de
Thu, 09 Aug 2001 15:33:30 +0200


On IRC, Bill Gribble just threw light on the meaning of the GnuCash 
operation "to scrub an account". I (and maybe others) thought of the 
following (wrong) meaning, which also made it into the explanatory file 
po/gnc-glossary.txt, "to delete an account". This is not correct. 
Instead, the proper definition is

"scrub, to":
  in the gnucash context, "to repair unbalanced transactions and orphan 
splits in an account tree"

i.e.

<grib> "Scrub" looks for any transactions that have debits != credits, 
or any splits that do not have accounts
<grib> it adds balancing splits to any unbalanced transactions (pointing 
to a special new account called "Unbalanced amounts" or something) and 
puts any splits without accounts into another special account

However, since at least Ben and me were convinced of that other wrong 
semantics, it seems necessary to find a better name for that operation 
(as grib quickly suggested). Here's a list of proposals -- please, 
native English speakers, pick your favorite word and give some comments.

- "to cleanup"
- "to cleanse"
- "clearance"
- "to polish"
- "to tidy"
- "to scour"
- "to scavenge"
- "to deterge"


Christian