Import prices API

[David Hampton]

On Sat, 2007-04-07 at 16:39 +0200, nospamforas wrote:

> > Also, F::Q itself has an API; it's a plugin architecture so you could plug
> > in your own module.
> >
> > But I have to ask:   why would you want to NOT use F::Q?
> 
> It is of no use to me, for the following reasons:
> 
> (a) All modules do not fit. I would have to write my own one. I checked that 
> thoroughly and repeatedly.

And?

> (b) I don't know perl, and I don't want to dig into it. Time is one issue.

And this affects the gnucash universe how?

> (c) I already wrote my own module a couple of years ago. It was enough then to 
> copy an existing module and change it a little bit. It only took one or two 
> days.
> 
> (d) Now I would have to write another module. This time it is much more 
> complicated and I estimate that I would have to spend a lot of time to learn 
> enough of perl to do it. -- Too much time. 

Its no more complicated now than it was a couple of years ago.

> (e) These modules have to be maintained once in a while. It would be even more 
> inefficient for me to always relearn perl just for that matter.

Yes, and?  All software has to be maintained once in a while, including
whatever software you end up writing to scratch this itch.

> Well, I could write a module to read quotes from a file and write my own 
> program to get those quotes beforehand and write them to a file to be picked 
> up by the module. But I don't like this approach. I would have to install not 
> only Finance::Quote but also the modules it needs just to be able to read 
> quotes from a file. The whole stuff would just need to be present....
> 
> It will be much more elegant to directly plug in my own program.

More elegant for you, and you will be the only one who can benefit from
the quote retrieval code you write.  If you write it as a F::Q module
then anyone in Germany who wants to get quotes from that source would
benefit.

> And if the 
> gnucash community would define and freeze an interface,

Its been defined and frozen for years.  Its just not documented.  I
added one extension a couple of years ago. No-one else has touched the
code in a long time.   That said, the current interface probably isn't
going to be around much longer.

> I guess it would help other people as well. But don't get me
> wrong: you don't need to do this just for me.

You're the only person that's asked for this in the six years I've been
involved with gnucash.

I'm planning rewriting this part of GnuCash in the near future so I'll
keep your request in mind, but I'm not promising anything.

David