German tax report should be disabled altogether (Re: [PATCH] - bug #554394 - Income Tax Enhancements - missing German patches attached)

[J. Alex Aycinena]

Dear Christian,

Thanks for the reply. Comments, below:

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 1:03 AM, Christian Stimming <stimming at tuhh.de> wrote:
> Dear Alex,
>
> the issue with the German version of tax.scm is that to my knowledge it is
> unusable anyway. Hence, IMHO it can be disabled altogether. In particular,
> if it causes some non-trivial work for you to keep it presumably working as
> before (read: more than 2 hours of work), it is most probably not worth this
> effort and instead it should be disabled altogether.
>
> Zitat von "J. Alex Aycinena" <alex.aycinena at gmail.com>:
>>
>> It seems that the location selection code in either 'gncmod-tax-us.c'
>> or in 'gncmod-locale-reports-us.c' is not being called; when I put
>> breakpoints in both and ran gnucash neither seemed to run since the
>> application didn't stop anywhere.
>
> Did you compile with --enable-locale-specific-tax? Otherwise the selection
> code of course is not being run.
>

Ah, that explains it. I didn't know about that. Now that I've started,
I'll recompile with the switch just to see it work in the unmodified
system and then again to check how my patches work. Just for the fun
of it. I'll let you know what I get.


> Other than that, I have no idea why it didn't work.
>
>> Is this the way it's supposed to work? Does this mean the German
>> income tax features are kaput and the German patches I sent are not
>> needed?
>
> I don't know whether the German tax features are now "more broken" than
> before. But to my knowledge it didn't really work at any time, but it rather
> was a pure proof-of-concept. I'll ask on the German list whether anyone was
> actually using it, and I'll let you know the result. But most probably I'll
> remove it.

Yes, that would be useful information. If anyone is using it, it
doesn't seem to make sense to me, long-term, that it should be based
on locale (I know when you implemented it was a 'quick and dirty'
proof-of-concept). If you had an American living in Germany they may
need to have access to both systems to file returns in both countries
rather than an either/or type of choice. Likewise for a German living
in the US. Perhaps a book-level selection made by the user of none,
one or several, among whatever country tax systems may be available,
based on what may apply to him or her? Anyway, we can wait and see
what response you get.

> I'm very sorry for the work you already spent on this. The other
> patches I'll apply soon.
>

Thanks, I would be most grateful.

> Regards,
>
> Christian
>
>

Regards,

Alex