Some thoughts and questions about iso-4217-currencies.*

[Herbert Thoma]

Christian Stimming schrieb:
>>> - There was a Euro converter in 1.x, which until now was not ported. But,
>>> what is the meaning of src/app-utils/gnc-euro.c? Is it in use? If yes,
>>> where? If I understood it right, currencies used there, must still be
>>> defined in iso-4217-currencies?
>> Well I was responsible for this code (gnc-euro.c, not the Euro converter,
>> which was done by Christian Stimming). gnc-euro.c does the correct Euro
>> conversion with proper rounding as defined by the European Central Bank. I
>> was most useful in the time between 1999 and 2001 when you could have
>> accounts in EUR and e.g DEM. In the account windows the status line will
>> show you the value of a DEM account in EUR and in the account tree window
>> you could have a column with the EUR value of your DEM accounts. This
>> functionality still works and tracks my stash of retained DEM coins quite
>> nicely.
> 
> Errr... in other words, today in 2009 the gnc-euro.c code is virtually 
> useless. Basically the app-util/gnc-euro.c is a second price data base which 
> happens to contain only the officially fixed rates for the euro.

You can view it this way. I don't think that it is totally useless,
because I still have all my pre-2001 DEM transactions in my .xac file
(yes, gnucash was called X-accountant back then ;-)) and the Euro rates
are not in the normal price-db by default.

I agree that app-util/gnc-euro.c is a second price-db and that this is
not a nice design.

> IIRC it was 
> introduced at a time when the real price data base didn't yet work well 
> enough. Now that the normal price data base works fine, it can and probably 
> should be removed rather soon. Or did I miss something here?

What I would like to see then in the normal price-db would be like this:
- the official exchange rates should be present by default
- there should be a way to specify that a currency was superseeded by
  another

This way we could handle non EURO cases, too. E.g. Turkish Lira was
replaced by New Turkish Lira with some fixed rate.

I might find time to look into this during the Christmas break, but I
can't promise anything now.

 Herbert.

> Regards,
> 
> Christian
> 

-- 
Herbert Thoma
Dipl.-Ing., MBA
Head of Video Group
Multimedia Realtime Systems Department
Fraunhofer IIS
Am Wolfsmantel 33, 91058 Erlangen, Germany
Phone: +49-9131-776-6130
Fax:   +49-9131-776-6099
email: tma at iis.fhg.de
www: http://www.iis.fhg.de/