1.5.97 first impression

[Robert Graham Merkel]

On Mon, 04 Jun 2001 15:41:37 Jeffrey W. Baker wrote:
> 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.
> 

I agree that there are a lot of dependancies.  However, if the distributors
do their jobs right, once the new GnuCash becomes part of the distros 
the problem largely goes away.  I also expect that Ximian will add it
to their GNOME distribution once the release is stable and they get
around to it, making the installation trivial.

WRT to the specific issue with slib, there are moves, I believe to get
it into the main guile distribution, so one dependancy will go away :)


> 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?
> 

Could you please explain in more detail what you mean?  It works for us
here.

> 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!)
> 
You can just leave them open and keep the tabs there - they are persistent
across sessions.  We should, however, be able to save named reports
explicitly,
and GnuCash doesn't do that yet.  

With respect to the perceived difficulty of writing custom reports, well,
all I can say is that I, and my fellow developere, like working with
scheme, 
and intend to keep doing so.  That said, if somebody were to contribute and
maintain another language binding, that would be all well and good, but I 
personally don't feel any need at this point.

> 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.
> 

Yes, the help-topics stuff is slightly broken at the moment, I believe.

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

This sounds like a bug in gtkhtml, which is used to display reports.  I'll
take a look.

> 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?
> 
Reports can be slow, but aren't usually *that* slow.  What version of guile
are you using?

> 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.
> 
I can't really comment here because I don't know enough about the issues,
but fair amounts of that are probably various bitmaps , guile stack (which
can be reduced if it turns out to be a problem), 
and about 10 megabytes of shared libraries (of which only one copy gets
loaded for all the processes, I think).

> 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.
> 

Like I said, it can be slow, but not that slow.  I have a P3-733 and my 
startup is much, much faster than that.

I should also add that several of the GnuCash developers are working on
speedups and performance analysis tools for guile.


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

This is partly a window manager issue.  I know that at some stages the 
splash screen was frameless, but Dave Peticolas (the lead programmer) 
changed it back because, I believe, it worked better with some window
managers that way.  Perhaps he will comment further . . . 

> 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.

That's certainly true.  However, success reports are much more of an ego
boost :)

Thanks for the report.


-- 
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Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk@mira.net

Go You Big Red Fire Engine
-- Unknown Audience Member at Adam Hills standup gig
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