Future of Gnucash (Javascript?)

[Derek Atkins]

Herbert Thoma <herbert.thoma at iis.fraunhofer.de> writes:

> Hmm, I just would like to point out that GnuCash was kind of a script once:
> It was a guile script that called the C/gtk/gnome code (OK, the GUI code
> was not directly scripted). It took us a long time to rework this back to
> a C application that called guile for the reports ...
>
> I am not that sure that an interpreted language is a good idea. But I am
> an electrical engineer not a computer scientist. So I tend to prefer
> languages that are closer to the hardware ...

Just to play devil's advocate, the guile/scheme modularization project
back in the 1.4-1.6 days never finished.  It was *supposed* to allow you
to easily write guile scripts against various pieces of gnucash just by
pulling in the necessary gnc modules.  Unfortunately that never
completed, so it still wound up being a single monolithic application...
And a slow one at that!  Moreover it was nearly impossible to debug.  So
reverting back to a regular C application was definitely the right move
then.

As for rewriting GnuCash now; I think it can be done piecemeal, but that
means you need to write wrappers in order to have drop-in replacements.
There's a TON of code; GnuCash is a HUGE application.

I'm not advocating staying where we are, nor am I advocating moving to
something new.  I'm just trying to advocate that we make a choice with a
clear understanding of the ramifications of our choice.

W.r.t. Gnome3 v. Gnome2 -- I think historically we've tried to keep
GnuCash compatible with the lowest-common-denominator stable release
from 6-12 months prior to release.  I think it's absolutely reasonable
to say that your OS must be no older than ~1 year old in order to build
GnuCash.  I DO NOT think it's reasonable to require a user to be running
yesterday's release of Debian/Unstable in order to build GnuCash.  (And
yes, this *was* the case for the original GnuCash 1.6 release -- pretty
much NOBODY could build it because the dependencies were all bleeding
edge).  Considering gnome3 hasn't been released yet, I think it should
be considered out-of-scope for GnuCash 2.6.

I'd honestly like to see us make more frequent releases.  I'd love to
see a release a year.  But historically we haven't had the development
resources to do that.  Either that or we picked projects that just too
too long.  Even the gnome1 -> gnome2 port took 18 calendar months (maybe
more -- I'd have to look).

-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