[RFC] A differnt options system

[Derek Atkins]

David Hampton <hampton at employees.org> writes:

> On Wed, 2005-02-16 at 12:13 -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:
>
>> The existing gnc option code has a method to save options into the
>> Book.  See the File -> Properties menu option.
>
> I know.
>
> My question is why are we maintaining and even extending a private
> options storage system that is totally orthogonal to the purpose of
> managing finances.  I think its a waste of time an resources, and Chris
> it right, it makes it harder for new developers to join gnucash.  

Because there isn't an alternative out there that has the same set of
features that gnucash uses?

>    I had
> a hard time understanding the options code myself when I first started,
> and i wouldn't say that I understand more than 50% of it today.  

Isn't this something that a bunch of documentation would fix?  We've
certainly had a dearth of developer docs in the code.  We've
definitely been working on fixing that.

I'm not trying to defend the existing options code.  It took me a long
time to grok it, and frankly I'd certainly rather see code written in
C with scheme wrappers than the current code-in-scheme with C
pull-outs.  But gconf doesn't fit as a drop-in replacement.

It IS kind of nice to have a single API that we can use for global
options, book options, report options, etc.  I wouldn't want to lose
that.

> believe that switching to a shared options system like gconf is the way
> to go.  That code is used by multiple applications (17 that I use on an
> occasional or more frequent basis), is maintained by others, and is
> already a dependency of gnucash.  The only downside I see is the current
> lack of per data file options.

That's a serious downside, and one that gnucash uses everywhere.

> David

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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