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

Derek Atkins warlord at MIT.EDU
Tue Aug 12 17:20:26 CDT 2003


Bob Weber <bweber at imsconsultants.com> writes:

> 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. 

All the dependencies you need are distributed by Red Hat with RH9.
Indeed, you could get a pre-built RPM -- an RPM for GnuCash 1.8.4
for RH9 is available from people.redhat.com/notting/gnucash/

> 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.

The real "problem" (IMHO) is that gnome distributes a bunch of
separate packages rather than a single monolithic distribution.

> 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.

Known bug in 1.8.1.  Has long since been fixed.

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

Probably the same bug.

> 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.

GnuCash requires a separate subaccount for each fund.  That's part of
the way it works.  Each fund requires its own account with its own
commodity in order to properly track the asset.

> 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.

Help is always welcome.

> 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.

drag-and-drop would be cool...

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available


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