Irritating

[Terry Boldt]

I have now been using gnucash 1.6.8 on RH 8.0 for several months and have two 
idiosyncacies that are really irritating. I don't know if the newer gnucash 
"fixes" these problems or not. I have been relunctant to upgrade due to 
trouble I had in getting 1.6.8 to compile and do not know what libraries will 
have to change if I try the newer version.

Anyway, the two things that I find really irritating after some use:

1. in reconciling an account, I open the reconcile dialog and expect the 
current date or at least some reasonable date to be the default. What I find 
is that the date that the dialog defaults to seems to be choosen totally at 
random. sometimes it is anywhere from today's date to a month in the future. 
Sometimes just the reverse, up to a month in the past. I recently reconciled 
one account and the date posted when the dialog opened was 3 months in the 
past. This is irritating because then not only the date must be changed, but 
also the balance figure. I have tried to determine whether there is a pattern 
to the date choosen and have been unable to discern a pattern. It appears the 
date is choosen totally at random. Instead of trying to get really 
intelligent in choosing the date, why not just use the current date? If I'm 
reconciling an account, I rarely, if ever, reconcile an account for sometime 
in the futre or for a date 3 months in the past. 99% of the time it is for 
today's balance from the statement I just downloaded from the financial 
institution.

2. When creating a new transaction in the register window of an account, the 
auto-complete function will complete the "description" field, normally the 
first field (after the date field if not for today) that I complete. This is 
great, but then the auto-complete function goes even further. As soon as I 
change to another field for the new transaction, the auto-complete function 
picks a transaction from the past in the register and completes the remaining 
fields. Again I have been unable to determine which past transaction is 
duplicated. sometimes it is the last transaction for the particular matching 
for the "description" field, sometimes it skips back a few transactions for 
that "description" and picks a transaction. Sometimes it doesn't complete the 
transaction at all. Sometimes it will swap the amounts in the deposits and 
withdrawl column (for a checking account for example), i.e., it will take the 
amount in the deposit column and put it into the withdrawl column and vice 
versa.  I assume that the assumption being that the next transaction is 
supposed to "pay-off" the prior transaction. This action again seems to be 
random. The action in completing the transaction would be great if all of my 
transactions for all transactions for a given "description" field were the 
same (e.g., monthly mortgage payments, etc.), but this is not the case. They 
are all unique. Invariably my "work" in creating the transaction is doubled, 
because I must now change all of the fields automatically created. I have 
looked in vain through the preferences dialogs for a way to turn this feature 
off (and retain the ability to complete fields based on my input). If the 
ability to turn off this feature is there, it is well hidden from my view.

Again, if these "features" have been changed/fixed in the lastest version, 
accept my apologiers for raising the issue here.

Another question, does anybody have experience in compiling the latest stable 
version under RH 8.0 and which libraries/packages need to be updated? If so, 
please update the mailing list so that I can attempt the update.