autoheader/autoconf errors

[Derek Atkins]

Phil Longstaff <phil_longstaff at comcast.net> writes:

> What would be needed to modify the architecture to allow it to more
> automagically use available features rather than needing to turn them on
> and off at compile time?  I'm thinking of something like a plug-in
> architecture where a library has an "initialize yourself and plug
> yourself in" function.

Oh, that's THERE..  You're just confused because gnucash is a
monolithic source tree.  However the IMPLEMENTATION is very
plug-and-play.

You see, GnuCash doesn't care.  Indeed, you can plug-in the OFX
modules later and GnuCash will happily use them.  The problem is that
you need to know what you are building at build time.  That's what the
configure switch is for.  If you don't have libofx, you cannot build
the ofx support -- and we did not want to require all users to have
libofx installed.

> I've noticed this lack in other areas.  To add a new quote source, for
> example, requires creating or modifying a number of files (perl, scheme
> and c).  

The problem is that the Quotes use Finance::Quote, which is external,
and there needs to be a mapping from GnuCash<->F::Q.  That's at least
consolidated now into one place, but that mapping still has to happen.

> Phil

-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