The payment amount must be greater than zero

[Chris Shoemaker]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 05:13:13PM +0200, Graham Leggett wrote:
> On Mon, August 20, 2007 4:36 pm, Derek Atkins wrote:
> 
> > See, this is where you're not quite right.  Gnucash really is a little
> > schizophrenic here; it's not sure if it wants to be a Personal finance
> > program or a Small Business finance program.  It's really trying to be
> > both.  It's NOT trying to "transition" to being ONLY a business finance
> > program.
> 
> There is no reason why Gnucash cannot be both a personal finance program
> or a small business program at the same time, there is very little
> difference between the two.
> 
> > Having said that; the business features SHOULD be better; but I have
> > no time to work on them and nobody else has really come forward to
> > spend the many man-months of effort required to bring it up to snuff.
> > But no, as a whole, I cannot say that gnucash is transitioning as you
> > suggest it is.   Sorry.
> 
> My concern is that having spent the many man months of effort, will
> patches be considered? Gnucash is probably one of the best candidates out
> there to become a proper business accounting application with a few fixes
> here and there. What worries me is that when these issues are brought up,
> invariably someone infers the problem cannot be fixed or solved.

These issues can be fixed.  I think this impression comes from the
fact that casual subscribers to this list tend to vastly
under-estimate the effort involved in fixing them.  If you enjoy a
challenge, are extremely persistent, and somewhat talented, you can
probably fix it.  But, I'd expect it to take more than 9 months of
spare-time hacking to do it well.

Sometimes the "patches accepted" mantra comes across as hostile, but
it's really not.  It's just an acknowledgement of several implicit
facts:

 1) GnuCash has many areas that could be improved.
 2) Nobody's working on improving that feature right now.
 3) None of the current devs are likely to start working on that soon.
 4) Hacking GnuCash is probably harder that you (the general "you") think.
 5) The current devs always welcome new devs, but the barrier imposed by 
GnuCash's overly-complex codebase is pretty high.
 6) We'd love to proven wrong, but we're not holding our breath, and you 
probably shouldn't either.

-chris

p.s. Just to be clear, this is more general than just the business
features - it applies to many areas of GnuCash.  And, it's not
specifically aimed at any one person - it's just a general response to
the ever-present "GnuCash should do X." comments.