1.7.4 comments

Jonathan Corbet lwn-gnucash@lwn.net
Mon, 02 Dec 2002 13:25:17 -0700


Hi, folks,

I thought I'd write up a quick piece in this week's LWN on the 1.8-to-be
release.  So I pulled down 1.7.4.  Things have come a long ways, congrats
are due to the developers.  That said, here's a few comments.  Please let
me know if I've missed something obvious...

- Installing gnucash hasn't gotten any easier over the years.  I gave up
  trying to install from source on my Debian unstable system.  The RH 7.x
  RPM, along with a gnucash.org g-wrap package, did the trick.  (BTW, the
  linas.org download area seems to be rather behind the times...)

- A default of "daily" for scheduled transactions does not seem
  particularly useful.  It's nice to see this feature find its way into
  gnucash, but the interface seems a bit cumbersome, still.  Some years ago
  I used to use MS Money; it had a nice, one-at-a-time interface for
  disposing of scheduled transactions.  Why did gnucash go with a "make
  several passes over the list" approach?

- Why no "twice a month" frequency for scheduled transactions?  One can
  fake it with two monthly transactions, but...

- Almost every gnucash window comes up too small on my system; I have to
  resize them to see the full contents.  In a bit of extra obnoxiousness,
  the main window occasionally resizes itself into something really small. 

- I get tons of complaints like:

The font "-*-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-80-*-*-*-*-*-ISO8859-1" does not support all the required character sets for the current locale "en_US.iso885915"
  (Missing character set "ISO8859-15")
  (Missing character set "ISO8859-15")

  Most things work fine anyway, but the "druid" windows come up blank.
  There must be a way to tell it to look for a font it likes, but I
  couldn't find it.

- The business features are a nice step in the right direction.  But...why
  can't I *type* a customer name when creating an invoice?  How do I
  customize the invoice format?  I couldn't even find a way to get my own
  address information into it, other than, perhaps, via a "logo" image.  

- The documentation is good, as far as it goes.  I can't find any
  documentation of the new business features, though.  I *think* its
  definitions of "payable" and "receivable" accounts are reversed.

Don't take the above as indicative of how my article will read; there's a
lot of good stuff in this release and I will point it out.

Thanks,

jon

Jonathan Corbet
Executive editor, LWN.net
corbet@lwn.net