No, 1.8.10 does not require kde

[Christian Stimming]

Hi,

as Martin Preuss already pointed out, there is no gnucash source or binary 
dependency on anything related to kde or qt. There is, however, one 
application-level dependency if and only if someone intends to setup the HBCI 
account with his HBCI bank. 

In that case and only in that case, the internals of aqbanking will require 
several additional packages to be installed, one of them being a Qt-based 
application called "kde_wizard" (the name is misleading -- it requires qt but 
not kde). This application contains the very verbose step-by-step setup 
wizard for the HBCI account, and the application is shared with other 
AqBanking-based financial managers that offer the HBCI features (e.g. 
KMyMoney). In that sense, this Qt-based application replaces most of the 
gnucash-1.8.9 and previous src/import-export/hbci/druid-initial-setup.c code. 

Martin Preuss as AqBanking/AqHBCI author and myself discussed this in quite 
some detail, but eventually we decided that such an external setup wizard is 
the better solution. The setup dialog itself is absolutely non-trivial. It 
contains about 30 different pages, and there are at least four fundamentally 
different ways to traverse these. The original gnucash dialog-initial-setup.c 
was offering much less of this functionality.

The point is that if I implemented the setup wizard in gnucash, then I would 
be the only one who could test it. But the HBCI protocol specifies several 
mutually excluding ways of initializing your HBCI account, and I would be 
able to test only one out of them (if this were in the gnucash code base). 
With an external setup program, Martin and I are already two testers instead 
of one for this setup program, and Martin usually uses chip cards whereas I 
usually use self-generated RSA keys. So Martin and I concluded that the code 
base for the end user would be of much much higher quality if we built one 
single setup application instead of duplicating the functionality into 
several applications. Also, the gnucash release cycle currently has slowed 
down a lot, but the HBCI features are rather rapidly changing (if there are 
bugs discovered, we want to offer bugfixes really quickly). In that sense, 
the HBCI feature list has a much different release cycle requirement than all 
the rest of the gnucash code base. Therefore we decided that it was in the 
best interest of all projects if the setup program is outsourced into a 
different application.

Am Samstag, 18. Dezember 2004 15:37 schrieb Peter O'Gorman:
> I was working toward getting a fink package for the new 1.8.10 release, and
> thought I had packaged all the newly required packages for hbci. I decided
> that since the hbci stuff was new I'd better actually test it before
> committing. So I tried and got "waitcallback.c:44: failed assertion `l'"
> output to my xterm. A bit of looking showed that gnucash tries to launch
> <prefix>/lib/aqbanking/plugins/0/wizards/aqhbci/kde_wizard for the hbci
> setup. This is a little annoying for a gnome-1.4 app. 

Again, this is only the case if you run "Actions -> HBCI Setup", click "Next", 
and then click "Run HBCI Setup druid". I expect this to be done really only 
by these people who are intending to use the HBCI things. You would need to 
have applied for a HBCI bank account first, anyway.

> I don't think that
> these changes should have been committed to the stable branch, I was
> already upset at having to package 4 new packages for a stable version
> (aqbanking, aqhbci, gwenhywfar, ktoblzcheck) 

I would be absolutely happy if this change would have occurred on a 1.8.x -> 
2.0.0 version step, but we all know about the current release cycle. The HBCI 
banks in Germany started to switch their required HBCI versions during 2004, 
and the German gnucash users need some quick reaction (read: within 3-6 
months) to that fact. The gnucash release cycle made it impossible to wait 
with this step for the next major step. I emphasize again and again that 
these package changes really only concern people who use --enable-hbci. If it 
bothers you and you don't need HBCI, then please please disable the hbci 
support. If you still prefer with everything enabled... you have been warned.

> but requiring kde is really over the top!

And yet again:  There is no source or binary requirement of kde or qt inside 
gnucash. If and only if someone intends to setup the HBCI account with his 
HBCI bank, then this person will need an additional qt-based program to be 
installed.

Christian