Current Guppi status?

[Christian Stimming]

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On Sunday 10 June 2001 18:29, Bill Gribble wrote:
> cstim, this is mostly directed at you since you've been doing most of
> the guppi work lately: what's the overall status of guppi as of
> current CVS (both gnucash and guppi cvs)?
>
> I recall there was some effort to make the fonts more configurable,
> and at the time you bailed out on it because of bugs in Guppi.  Have
> those bugs been resolved?

Not yet, but I haven't checked lately. I will follow up on that. The 
code/API exists (in Guppi cvs) and 'just' needs to work right. 

> I have just gotten stacked barcharts to work for the first time, and
> it looks to me like there's something going wrong with the way the
> borders around the bar segments are drawn... maybe the dimensions are
> off-by-one?  I can't really tell.  Is this a known problem?  Is there
> some idea of how to fix it?

The problem is 'known' in the sense that I've been looking at the same 
thing forever. I don't have any idea of how to fix it, and it didn't look 
like there were an easy solution for that. I'm not too keen to start 
working on it.

> Overall, what's the next step for integrating guppi with gnucash?  are
> there features we'd like to see for reports that aren't currently
> doable?  I remember a discussion about generating price graphs using
> the non-guppitank guppi interface.  I haven't looked at the current
> price scatter plot, but I'm assuming it's using the existing guppitank
> scatter plot?

The scatter plot is indeed the existing guppitank scatter plot. This has 
some obvious limitations (most notably, no settable x-axis labels), but 
for people who tolerate those it works fine.

I have had some ideas for more features in the graphs: scatter plot with 
x-axis labels and settable x- and y-axis dimensions; pie plot with 
settable slice labels and/or no slice labels; x-axis labels automatically 
determining whether they have to rotate or not; bar plot with labels on 
top of each stacked bar and/or for each segment in the stacked bar and/or 
for each bar in the non-stacked plot. If me or somebody else were to 
implement those, it would probably be the easiest to extend the existing 
guppitank interface and add some more options there. However, that would 
require users to upgrade Guppi if they want to use the new features.

I have had some more ideas for completely new graphs, namely, a stock 
price plot just like the one shipped with Guppi as a demo. If me or 
somebody else implements that, then the easiest thing to do would be to 
use Guppi's full-blown API directly from GnuCash, and the mentioned demo 
in Guppi would be a good starting point on how to use the API. This would 
also eliminate the need to upgrade Guppi, but OTOH if Guppi's API changes 
then GnuCash somehow has to adapt as well. Jon Trowbridge said that Guppi 
API changes are still quite likely.

Those ideas exist only as ideas, and so far I didn't have time to have a 
look into that.

Furthermore, I kind of lost interest in Guppi coding. I am content with 
the current graphs, i.e. everything I was looking for now exists (stacked 
barcharts, price plots), and now I am much more interested in other 
aspects of GnuCash: internationalization and Online-Banking, i.e. the 
German standard HBCI. The standard is around, and proprietary software is 
around as well, but there is no single free implementation yet. Some 
coders are working on it, and I would like to help out there and focus on 
integrating their API into GnuCash. If the HBCI implementation 
works, the user would be able to enter a transaction in the checking 
account register, additionally enter the RSA key passphrase, and GnuCash 
would open a TCP connection to the bank server to execute the transaction 
immediately...

Christian
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