GnuPOS development terminated

[Bill Gribble]

On Fri, 2001-11-23 at 06:58, Conrad Canterford wrote:
> All,
> Due to the progressing (I believe) integration of mercator with gnucash, 
> and the apparently high level of development work currently going into 
> mercator, further work on gnupos seems futile. Thank you to everyone who 
> provided comments, suggestions and help.

I'm sorry to hear that.  IMO gnupos has/had a lot to offer that Mercator
doesn't, as you have pointed out.  

> For the record I would like to state that, in my personal opinion, 
> mercator is slow, looks clunky and (being written in java) is inherantly 
> yucky. 

Yep, maybe, sort of :) 

The integration of Gnucash with Mercator is a project that is
interesting to me, but I don't necessarily think it's the be-all and
end-all of this line of development.  In particular, Mercator doesn't
and probably won't ever do table service (i.e. restaurant-style POS with
lots of simultaneously open tickets), which is a huge part of the POS
marketplace. 

The main advantage Java has for POS is that more and more POS hardware
manufacturers are providing JavaPOS drivers for their stuff, and while
any one piece of hardware is generally not hard to reverse engineer
there are so many out there and so few Linux users of them that you need
to be able to use drivers from the mfg.  Sun and IBM are pushing hard
for the JavaPOS standard to get adopted everywhere.

> It does, however, appear to work, which is more than I can say 
> for my effort (but in my defence, I would like to point out that my 
> effort was the work of just one person).

Don't take this the wrong way :), but Mercator is also the work of one
person, Quentin Olson, except for the recent changes done by Jim
LewisMoss to convert it from Interbase to Postgres and clean up the
code.  

b.g.