Addition of HBCI support, Maturity of 1.7-branch, next stable release time frame?

[Chris Lyttle]

Also I think a 4-6 month timframe would give me enough time/incentive to 
get the user docs into shape

Chris

On 4 Apr 2002, Derek Atkins wrote:

> Christian,
> 
> I would suggest working from the 1.7/CVS tree.
> 
> . The Postgres code in the CVS tree is more stable than the 1.6.
> . The modularity is pretty cool, and seems to work well.
> . There are some new features in the CVS mainline that I think
>   should get into the next release.
> 
> I'm honestly not sure what particular features are in the works on
> that branch.  I know that Scheduled Transactions are only
> half-working, and the business code is mostly working but "disabled".
> I don't know what other stuff people are working on.
> 
> I think it would be less work in the long run to get HBCI into the CVS
> code and make a 1.8 release than it would be to get HBCI into the 1.6
> tree, make an interim release, and then up-porting into 1.7.  But that
> is up to you.
> 
> -derek
> 
> Christian Stimming <stimming@tuhh.de> writes:
> 
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > In a message to this ML yesterday it was pointed out that there is an
> > Open Source API for the German Online Banking standard HBCI available
> > now. I had been looking forward to this since last summer, and
> > eventually it seems like this API will actually be usable from within
> > Gnucash.
> > 
> > A note about the point of HBCI support: Roughly half of the banks in
> > Germany use the HBCI standard as their online banking technology, so
> > there is quite some demand for HBCI client software. There still
> > doesn't exist ANY open source HBCI-capable software (Linux and/or
> > Windows) out there in Germany, and there exists exactly ONE
> > HBCI-capable proprietary software on Linux (Moneyplex by Matrica
> > http://www.matrica.de/prodmpxwinlnx.htm Price: EUR 59 and up). On
> > Windows, there are a few more (of course), but they still are only a
> > few. This means that IF we add HBCI-support in Gnucash, we would
> > actually be the FIRST ONE to do this. Within all humility, this would
> > probably give us press reactions up to the leading-edge computing
> > journals ("First open source HBCI client ever available") and it might
> > boost our user base in Germany by maybe a factor of 10.
> > 
> > However, when I think about implementing HBCI support in Gnucash, I
> > started to wonder what development branch of Gnucash would be suitable
> > to do this. Of course, one would say, this is a new feature and thus
> > it should be developed on the 1.7 branch, since this is per definition
> > the development branch. Additionally, quite a bunch of Gnucash
> > internals have changed now in the 1.7 branch, so the development in
> > 1.6 and 1.7 is quite different and preferrably we should only work
> > within one branch of the two. On the other hand, the time frame of
> > implementing HBCI support *and* getting enough users to test it would
> > be to do that during the next ~3-4 months. AND once the HBCI support
> > has reached a beta stage, I would definitely want to make a *new
> > stable release* with precisely the HBCI support added (and giving us
> > the press etc. echo mentioned above).
> > 
> > So I would like to ask the whole community:
> > 
> > * What do you think about the maturity of the 1.7 branch?
> > 
> > * What would need to be done before 1.7 reaches a beta-stable stage?
> > This doesn't necessarily mean that all of the new user-visible
> > features currently in 1.7 need to be stable and/or complete; we could
> > very well postpone the completion of some of the user-visible features
> > to a later point in time. But for the HBCI feature, we would need to
> > have the internal new features of Gnucash to be definitely stabilized.
> > 
> > * What would be needed to make a new stable release from the 1.7
> > branch within the next 4-6 months?
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > 
> > Christian Stimming
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnucash-devel mailing list
> > gnucash-devel@lists.gnucash.org
> > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
> 
>