Net Asset Calculation

[Christian Stimming]

Nigel Titley wrote:

>>If I were to nominate an area that I thought would be the most
>>productive in helping build the team, I'd be suggesting that the
>>developer documentation is sadly lagging behind the rest of the
>>development. 
> 
> I have to agree with what Conrad says here. I've done quite a bit of
> delving into the code by now, trying to fix bugs, and because of the
> lack of documentation, both within the code and without, I'm still as
> ignorant of how Gnucash actually knits together as a whole as when I
> started. 


I agree, too. Last fall, some (small) effort was spent on documenting 
the core engine function for the 'doxygen' doc generation tool. You can 
see the results of this work e.g. in src/engine/Transaction.h, or when 
you invoke 'make doc'.

However, this effort never came to a point where really the 'big 
picture' was being documented. But of course something like 'the big 
picture' is essential for newcomers to not be too frightened by the code 
base. If somebody could step up to work on this, it would mean putting 
together the texts from src/doc/design, from 'make doc', and from 
various other places :-) , e.g. 
src/report/report-system/doc/report-html.txt for writing a new report, 
or src/gnc-module/doc/design.txt for writing a new gnucash module.

If somebody (like you, Kevin or Nigel) would volunteer to collect and 
write documents like that, I would happily help at reviewing/ 
proof-reading these.

And about a possible testing process: During my heavy-coding phase for 
the HBCI module (like, September through December last year), I would've 
loved to hear from a larger group of users and testers, and I would've 
happily joined any sort of formal process to further streamline testing 
and bug fixing. However, now since I have stopped the active coding, and 
many other coders seem to have reduced their commitment as well, I would 
agree (as mentioned above) with the previously mentioned statement: The 
current no. 1 challenge for the gnucash project is not so much finding a 
better testing/release process, but rather finding a better "how to 
encourage and support new developers" process... Better source code 
documentation is almost surely a necessary condition for that. I don't 
know whether it's sufficient as well... :-)

Christian

PS: As for the text format of developer documentation, AFAIK 'doxygen' 
can be used for big text documents just as good as for auto-generated 
source code, so maybe this might be a good tool to use even for the 
non-autogenerated parts of developer documentation.