greetings

[Larry Siden]

Greetings all.  I am new to GnuCash.  I encountered GC while looking for
an alternative to Quicken b/c I now run exclusively Linux on my home PC
and I've assumed that Intuit has no plans for a GNU/Linux version of
Quicken!  However, I soon encountered several problems that made me
question GC's stability (1.8.8 release).  However, after perusing
several of these lists, I concluded that GC does has a faithful
following of both users and developers, and since I am a currently
unemployed developer who champions free (as in speech!) software, and
would like to have a stable cash-mgt app on my home Gnu/Linux box, I
would like to contribute some time and energy to the effort to get GC up
to an industrial-strength world-class application that can beat the
socks off anything that Windows can offer.

I already downloaded and built the "1.8.8-branch" branch from CVS, and
would like to attack some bugs, starting, if possible, with the ones
that are keeping me from properly reconciling my check register.

Right now I'm so new and have encountered so many problems trying to get
started with GC, I hardly know where to start.  Several of the problems
I encountered are not even mentioned on Bugzilla, which concerned me,
b/c at first I was not sure whether this might be due to something
"strange" about my own box, or b/c GC did not have a wide enough
following to keep Bugzilla up-to-date.  For example, GC suddenly crashed
whenever I tried to finish a reconciliation that didn't balance (b/c I
don't have the true initial balance).  I found nothing about this in
Bugzilla, however when I tried it again after clearing only several
transactions, it worked, and now I can't repeat the crash.  (I'd like to
know if there's an easy way to undo the "R" status of ALL the reconciled
transactions w/out having to do it one by one so that I can reproduce
this bug before reporting it.  I don't see any point in reporting a bug
that I can't reproduce!)

So I guess my bottom line is that I'd like to help but only if I know
that I can count on the encouragement and support of some key developers
including whoever maintains the patches and releases.  That isn't to say
that I expect every patch I submit to be accepted, just that I'd like to
know that there are one or more people I can turn to for help getting
pointed in the right directions while I'm getting started and that my
efforts will be appreciated by someone.  Anybody there?

Regards,
-Larry Siden
http://umich.edu/~lsiden