Offer to help: Problems with building gnucash, and importing data

[Bob Weber]

Hello. I recently read the "call for help", and am looking to do so.
I've been using GnuCash for several months, and am impressed with it's
capabilities. Contrary to the "call", I do think financial sw is "sexy".

I have questions/suggestions, though I'm not sure how useful they will
be. 

Building GnuCash:

I have tried to build 1.8.4 for my system (Redhat 9), but have always
met a roadblock somewhere. The dependencies are a pain, but I'm able to
get the source and rebuild most of them. However, one package (offhand,
I don't know which one, but I can find out) fails to compile. 

The end result is, upgrading is difficult, true to tthe website's claim.
You almost have to wait for a linux distribution that includes it. I
think we really need to improve this somehow.

Importing data:

This weekend I imported some data from Quicken. Importing into GnuCash
isn't very smooth. After the import I had to walk through each of my
Quicken accounts and fix those things that didn't import as desired. A
perfect import probably insn't reasonable, but the main problems I had
were:

1. Some accounts, like my Income-Salary account, seemed to import all of
my paychecks such that they were withdrawls, not deposits. I had to edit
each entry, putting "-" signs in fron of each value.

2. For some reason, I had the same issue with transactions that were
tied to my Cash account. Deposits became withdrawls.

3. The account list wanted to create subaccounts for each Payee in my
investment accounts. For example, in Quicken, I have a category of
Investments - LT Capital Gains, with entries for each of my mutual
funds. When I imported this into GnuCash, it created a separate
subaccount for each of my mutual funds in the LT Capital Gains account.

Maybe these issues have been fixed recently. If not, is there a way that
some documentation might help someone get their data imported more
accurately? Can I help? This won't benefit me (I hope to not have to do
this again), but being able to import smoothly would remove a big
roadblock for people moving from Windows to Linux.

Also, being able to select multiple accouts in the accout list, and
being able to "drag and drop" them would greatly speed up fixing issue
3.

Helping out:

I'm open to ideas on how I can help out. Like everyone else, my time is
limited. I work full-time, and teach on the side. But, if there's a
small piece that can be "broken off" and worked on, maybe I can help. I
have quit a bit of SW development experience, mostly in C, but my
experience is with embedded apps and some linux development. I'm not
very knowledgable with GUI development, but I'd love to learn more.

Or, maybe How Tos, or simply identifying some issues. As a regular user,
I have a large supply of ideas, suggestions and complaints. 

Let me know if you believe I can be of any help.

- Bob