gnucash on os/x, thinking of a native port to aqua/cocoa

Christian Stimming stimming at tuhh.de
Thu Jan 29 03:04:47 CST 2004


Douglas Harvey schrieb:
> First off, I wanted to congratulate all of you on the state of gnucash 
> as it exists right now.  

Thanks.

> I am thinking about making gnucash available as a fully native OS/X aqua 
> application, to the extent that this is possible.  If gnucash could be 
> made as simple to install and use as other mac apps, this would be a 
> huge benefit for gnucash as well as mac users like myself.
> 
> My question to this list is, does this seem practical/feasible?  

Did I understand your question correctly: You are asking how feasibly it 
is to port gnucash to a new GUI toolkit (which happens to be the native 
Mac OS/X GUI toolkit)?

I really appreciate any thoughts about widening the portability of 
gnucash, and I really don't want to discourage you too much.

However: Gnucash has roughly 300 000 lines of code. Out of this, roughly 
100 000 lines are somewhat related to gnome (wc `find . -name '*.c' 
|grep gnome`). This means porting gnucash to a new GUI toolkit requires 
rewriting of one third of gnucash. Given that the current codebase took 
probably 6-8 man-years to be built (assuming from 1999 up to now a 
developer group equivalent to 2 full-time developers was working on 
gnucash), this undertaking will probably require another 1-2 
man/person-years...

In other words, as long as you don't have a group of 3-5 developers who 
start working on such an undertaking, your effort is probably better 
invested in the existing Fink port or something along similar lines.

Regards

Christian Stimming




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