On Gnucash, G2, and Architecture

[Chris Shoemaker]

On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 05:49:19PM +0200, Christian Stimming wrote:
> Chris Shoemaker schrieb:
> >>I agree, but I think it's bad right now that devs aren't concerned
> >>about getting g2 out the door.  At least it feels to me that you don't
> >>care about getting g2 released.  Please tell me I'm wrong!  But it
> >>sounds like you'd rather rebuild working code now than wait until
> >>after g2 to re-work it.
> >
> >I'm sorry I can't tell you what you want to hear.  IMO, attracting
> >devs is more important than releasing g2.  As for cause and effect,
> >the former can cause the latter, but the latter will not help the
> >former.
> 
> We've really seen many different seasons of developers that get 
> attracted and leave again. IMHO it really doesn't depend much on the 
> internal code quality. Instead, the question should be whether a 
> developer can *quickly* start with "scratching his itch" (instead of 
> cleaning up other bit-rotted code), and that depends much more on 
> up-to-date GUI library dependencies as it does on internal design 
> patterns that aren't touched by 90% of the new developers anyway.

Really?!  I think you're exactly right about the question being how
quickly the itch can be scratched.

But, in my experience, I don't think GUI dependence on gtk1 instead of
gtk2 slowed me down much, if at all.  OTOH, understanding the options
system well enough to make a report options dialog offer a selection
of existing budgets took me, oh, an embarrassingly long time. :-)

> 
> Now I can surely understand your priorities here, if scratching _your_ 
> personal itch unfortunately means you have to deal with some of the 
> worse portions of the gnucash code. However, in the overall project we 
> have to remember the respect for each other's working areas, namely not 
> to break the other's areas only because you're right into your own 
> project. There would need to be a large consensus that these fundamental 
> changes would help for the overall project *right now*. It seems this 
> consensus is not there for some of your proposed changes -- which, as I 
> fully understand, doesn't make you happy.

Just FTR, I certainly don't advocate anything that would impede
other's progress toward releasing g2.  The lack of consensus about the
best course of action doesn't really bother me as much as it might
sound like.  I'm not trying to convince anyone to abandon releasing g2
as their highest priority.  I'd love to see a stable g2 released --
it's a worthy goal.  I'm just explaining why that's not *my* highest
priority.

> 
> However, I fully support the priority of getting G2 up and running, 
> because that's really becoming more and more vital -- any of those 
> hypothetical "more developers" really expect an (almost) up-to-date GUI 
> library or they won't come here in the first place. Our competitor 
> KMyMoney is catching up quite quickly, and they fully benefit from their 
> choice of GUI toolkit. In other words, quite soon a developer with some 
> "personal itch" will have the free choice in terms of existing features 
> between gnucash and kmymoney, and if gnucash at that time will still be 
> stuck in five-year-old GUI dependencies, then most probably a developer 
> will just pick the other project and happily use their qt3/kde 
> dependencies. It's really not all the internal code, but it's the whole 
> context of the internal code *plus* the necessary dependencies.
> 
> Go G2 go!

Amen!

-chris