SX's (was Re: Net Asset Calculation)

[Tim Wunder]

On Tuesday 11 March 2003 11:31 am, someone claiming to be Derek Atkins wrote:
<snip>
> Are you willing to donate time and code to help fix it?  If not, then

The spirit is willing, but the mind is weak (or something like that). Who's 
willing to walk me thru how this jumble of code works? Bearing in mind that 
I'll need to learn C, Scheme, and the logic of the gnucash code from (nearly) 
scratch. Hell, I'd *love* to help fix it, and I have some time, and I 
*really* want SX's to work properly, but by the time I learn enough to help 
with it, jsled will be back and have everything fixed ;-) and you'll be 
working on the gnome 3 port...

> frankly I don't want to hear this kind of response.  We are _NOT_
> Quicken or Money.  We do _NOT_ have a team of tens, let alone
> hundreds, of developers and testers.  We are _NOT_ paid for our time
> and effort.  So, yes, half-baked code does make it through the
> "process".  Tough.  We're doing the best we can given the limited
> resources we have.
>

Agreed (mostly), but a broken feature shouldn't be touted as a feature. At 
least warn the poor unsuspecting user that the feature is not finished.

> Based on user experience so far, SXes have clearly _never_ worked
> right.  But that alone does not warrant holding back a release.  SXes

Certainly it doesn't. But it also doesn't warrant listing SX's as a new 
feature in the press releases. And, FWIW, I find that SX's mostly work. But I 
suspect I'm far more tolerant of its current state than most users would be. 
There are users who still dual boot simply because Quicken or MS Money gives 
them scheduled transactions. They won't be as tolerant.

> are an extraneous feature, and we can easily tell users "don't use
> them yet."  There were enough another other fixes completed to warrant
> a 1.8.2.  Hopefully the SX code can be fixed for 1.8.3, but that
> depends on getting code.  The SX author is busy with real life (as are
> ALL of us), and frankly I don't blame him for not being very active in
> Gnucash -- it doesn't pay his salary.  Waiting would have meant waiting
> indefinitely, and that's NOT ok.
>

Agreed again. So why do we list Scheduled Transactions as a new feature in 
1.8.x when they're clearly borken (regardless of the validity of the reason 
for their borken-ness)?

> Open Source is not perfect.  The reason it's better than closed-source
> is NOT because it's free.  The reason it's better is because it can
> leverage the help of hundreds of developers, each working on small
> improvements.  Well, I'm sorry, put up or shut up.  Either provide
> some code, be one of those people making gnucash better, or stop
> complaining.
>
> -derek, who's had a very bad day, and it's not even noon yet
>

Relax...

Tim
<snip>

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