1.5.97 first impression

[Jeffrey W. Baker]

Hi,

I've been trying to install GnuCash off and on for at least two years.
1.5.97 is the first version that I have successfully installed.
Congratulations are in order, I think.  Here is a rundown of my
impressions:

Installation is much more of a pain in the ass than any other program I
have ever installed.  SLIB is definitely the weak link: installing it from
source is a completely undocumented headache.  Anyway I finally got it
installed when I found mention of GUILE_LOAD_PATH on some mailing list
somewhere.  GnuCash also has more obscure dependencies than any other
application on my system.  Installing all of them is a chore, even for a
user who has been developing software on Unix for decades.  That said, I'm
sure most people install GnuCash from packages.  It's the package
maintainers that we'll have to put on the suicide watch.

Anyway, Once the beast is up and running it works acceptably.  I did
notice that the initial new file wizard doesn't display any account types
in its list, so I couldn't use it jumpstart my accounts tree.  Is it
supposed to work in this verion?

Another major flaw was that I carefully configured my expenses pie chart,
but after I closed its notebook tab, all my settings went away.  I chose
Reports->Income & Expense->Expense Pie Chart, and it had the default
settings again.  How do I save my custom reports?  (Also it looks like you
have to be a Ph.D CompSci to create new reports.  Some people can make
macros with *Basic but try teaching my wife about functional programming!)

The help browser left navigation doesn't stay in sync with the display on
the right.  Also selecting something on the left navigates to something
else entirely on the right.

If GConf is unavailable (because oafd has gone out to pasture), GnuCash
will crash when trying to create reports.

Speaking of reports, generating even the simplest reports takes forever.
On my 1.2 GHz Athlon with 512M of memory, generating the pie chart of
exactly one expense takes over 30 seconds.  Is there some way I can fix
that?

Memory usage is completely out of proportion.  With a few ledger entries
and one report, the RSS is 21M, almost as much as Mozilla.  Restarting
doesn't help.

Starting GnuCash also takes forever.  I noticed with strace that a whole
lot of Scheme hoo-haw happens at startup time, then the display blocks
for 30 seconds generating my report.

The splash screen is usually obscured at startup by the main window, and
it also has a frame which usually splash screens do not.

I noticed that the account tree is collapsed when I restart.  I would
rather save the previous expanded/collapsed state.  Is there a preference?

Those are the only issues I noticed so far.  I hope you don't think I'm
being too negative, I believe that problem reports are more useful to
developers than success reports.

Regards,
Jeffrey Baker