libofx in Debian

[Christian Stimming]

Just to clarify the libofx and aqbanking dependency of gnucash:

Am Samstag, 12. Januar 2008 19:04 schrieb Thomas Bushnell BSG:
> I have been told that the new aqbanking stuff supports OFX and does not
> use the problematic DTD files.
> (...)
> Also, this amps up the urgency on gnucash supporting the new aqbanking
> stuff: now it's needed not only for HBCI, but also for any OFX use at
> all.

GnuCash has a built-in importer for OFX files in the src/import-export/ofx 
module. This importer requires libofx. If libofx is not available, 
the "Import OFX file" is no longer available. There are no plans by any of 
the current developers of rewriting that OFX file importer module so that it 
would work without libofx.

Additionally, GnuCash has a bunch of features using aqbanking in the 
src/import-export/hbci module. Currently, this GnuCash module offers some 
online banking functionality including statement download, which implies 
internally some kind of file parsing comparable to a file import. When the 
online banking uses OFX DirectConnect (as opposed to e.g. HBCI), 
aqbanking-2.x was using libofx to parse that data, but aqbanking-3.x will be 
using a parser of its own for that. Hence, aqbanking without libofx in 
aqbanking-2.x would not offer OFX DirectConnect, but in aqbanking-3.x it will 
have it even without libofx. 

As for porting GnuCash to aqbanking-3.x: The newer library is not source 
compatible to the older one at all. Hence, it is impossible to have gnucash 
source code that can work with both aqbanking2 and aqbanking3 - there are way 
too much changes. We have a wiki page that lists all TODO items that need to 
be done in gnucash. I'd estimate this to be 1-2 weeks work if you are already 
familiar with gnucash, or 3-4 weeks if you are not. I won't do this because I 
don't have time.

For importing OFX files into gnucash, libofx is required and it is going to be 
this way until someone rewrites the "Import OFX file" to use a different 
parser. One possibility is to use the OFX file parser of aqbanking3 and 
re-using parts of the import-export/hbci module, which will then replace the 
import-export/ofx module. However, of course the OFX file parser of 
aqbanking3 has a completely different API and this requires additional 
developer work. 

Christian