The payment amount must be greater than zero

[Derek Atkins]

"Graham Leggett" <minfrin at sharp.fm> writes:

> 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.

Oh, I agree here.  The original design was to try to allow gnucash to
be both.

>> 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.

Of course they will!  All patches are considered.  Most of them even
get applied.  But honestly if you're working many man-months on a
feature I would hope that you're sending in patches along the way and
working with the development team.  If you spend man-months on your
own in a heads-down environment then sure, it's less likely that your
changes will be committed right away because you might have mistakes
in there.

Yes, there are some patches in bugzilla that haven't been applied yet.
In many cases there are good reasons for that.  In others, not so good.
In one case, the patch works around a symptom for a problem but doesn't
really fix the underlying problem, and doesn't fix the problem in all
cases, only in some subset of cases.  But I'll probably get that patch
applied, anyways, because there hasn't been a better solution..  If only
I could find the time.

Also, who has infered that these problems cannot be fixed or solved?
ANY problem can be solved with the right amount of programming effort.
It's just that some efforts are larger than others.

For example, I suspect a man-week of effort to fix this Invoice
problem..  But I don't have a man-week to devote to it.  It's not a
large problem.. It's certainly much more contained than, say, the
register rewrite or reports or CSS or lots of other things on the
wishlist.

Hense my refrain:  send in a patch.

> Regards,
> Graham

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available