GnuCash-2.0 first impressions

[Ganesan Rajagopal]

Hi,

This is a long post, please bear with me :-) I have two angles to this post,
a user angle and a developer angle. First the user angle. I am a long time
gnucash user; I manage all my personal finances including Indian stocks and
mutual funds using Gnucash. I was really glad to see GnuCash 2.0 development
pick up speed a few months back and was waiting a chance to try it out. I
managed to get it compiled out from svn without major problems.

First impressions: 

* GnuCash 2.0 definitely looks much better. I guess GNOME 2.0 plays a big
  part in this. 
* The UI changes will take some time to get used to but I didn't find it
  much of a bother. 
* GnuCash 2.0 parsed my xml file with nearly five years worth of
  transactions without any hiccups. All the data appears to be preserved
  intact.  
* In the five or ten minutes that I played around with it it never crashed
  on me even once.  

So Congrats guys, you have a winner :-).

A few issues

* GnuCash doesn't seem to honor the default currency properly. My default
  currency is Indian Rupee (INR) but reports appear to be confused and uses
  USD. 
* In the transaction view, the row height seems to be a bit small. The fonts
  appear slightly truncated.
* Picking currencies is a pain. There must be an easier way, may be a two
  level menu?

And the last issue is not 2.0 specific. I have been frustrated by the XML
file format that GnuCash uses and have been frequently bitten by not saving
before closing. I never learnt to replay the logs, the one time I did, it
seemed to take tens of minutes to replay a day's log. I would really love to
have a transaction entry that was really a transaction, in other words use
an SQL database. I have played around with storing my transactions in
PostgreSQL and it seemed to work fairly well for some time, but it had some
issues that I cannot remember right now, so I had to revert to the XML
format. 

That brings me to the developer angle of this post. I know a SQLite backend
is definitely planned for GnuCash in the future (as possibly the default
backend?). However, I don't see anybody actively working on it right now. I
would like to start hacking on it in my spare time. I have done lots of
C/C++ programming, and some SQL experience (though not much experience in
GUI development), so I think I should be able to work with somebody on this
project or even take a shot on it on my own. The question is where do I
start? Should I start writing a qof backend for SQL?

Ganesan

-- 
Ganesan Rajagopal (rganesan at debian.org) | GPG Key: 1024D/5D8C12EA
Web: http://employees.org/~rganesan        | http://rganesan.blogspot.com