What can I do to help?

[Rob Browning]

Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU> writes:

> The main hurdle right now is the lack of a user-created startup file
> (ala .emacs) that gets loaded at system startup.

Hmm.  There used to be such a thing, though I don't know if it was
removed during one of the startup reworks.  It used to be that gnucash
created ~/gnucash/, and would save any user customizations to
~/.gnucash/auto, but if you created a ~/.gnucash/user ("user" might be
the wrong name), then that file would take precedence and be loaded
instead of the auto file.

The normal thing to do in ~/.gnucash/user would be to make any
customizations you wanted and load the "auto" file.  Depending on your
needs, you might load the auto file before your customizations, after,
or not at all.

> Similarly lacking is a plug-in directory to all the system to
> autoload new modules (ala a system-wide '.emacs' ;) I think once
> both of those issues are resolved it will be MUCH easier for users
> to write gnucash applets.

As a short-term solution, you could just require users to add a

  (use-modules (some-add-on))
  (some-add-on-init)

to their .gnucash/user file.  Add-on's would be placed in the normal
gnucash guile module dir.

You could also arrange a convention for the above two calls, and add a
gui for selecting modules.  When one is selected, lines like the above
are placed in the ./gnucash/auto file.

This might in fact be better than universally enabling all the modules
on the system for all users, though you can get the same effect if
modules by-default do nothing when loaded (if appropriate) until
"turned on" somehow in a given user's config.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org
Previously @cs.utexas.edu
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