rfc: marking non-leaf example accounts as placeholders

[Chris Shoemaker]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 11:06:57AM -0500, Josh Sled wrote:
> In the example account hierearchies, it seems that we should encourage
> the creation of placeholder accounts for all the non-leaf accounts ...
> any objections to my changing the datafiles in this way?

I don't know...

Are any groups of sub-accounts not intended to be an exhaustive
categorization of their parents?  I know I create sub-accounts where I
intend the parent to remain postable as a place for less-specialized
transactions.

I might leave some of these as postable:

Liabilites:Loans
Expenses:Interest
Income:Interest Income
Expenses:Auto
Expenses:Insurance
Expenses:Professional Fees
Expenses:Repairs
Expenses:Taxes
Expenses:Travel and Entertainment
Expenses:Utilites
Expenses:Entertainment
Assets:Investments:Retirement
Expenses:Taxes (Spouse)
Assets:Investments:Spouse Retirement

Maybe it's a matter of taste, but I can imagine that these categories
may be specific enough for some user's tastes, and some transactions
may not fit into one of the provided sub-accounts.

I would agree that many of the other non-leaf accounts should default
to placeholder.  In the end, it's just a default anyway, but I'd
prefer to err toward leaving some of them postable since I think the
pain of either 1) making a new subaccount when you don't really want
to or 2) unmarking a account as placeholder is slightly greater than
the danger of leaving a parent account as postable even when you don't
intend to post to it.

I think at least the top-level accounts should be placeholders, though.

-chris