Finance::Quote options (again)

[Wm Tarr]

Can't find an exact previous thread point to add onto as there have been 
many here and in gnucash-user so apols for starting a new thread about 
something some people may consider well done by now.

perl's Finance::Quote is what it is.

Getting quotes from google finance has been mentioned (can't find the 
posting right now)

I'd like to throw in http://getquote-tedsoft.blogspot.co.uk/ as a 
possible alternative too.  It is OOo / LibreOffice friendly; the author 
isn't (as far as I can see) anti general use and has noticed the same 
malfunctioning we have through Finance::Quote (i.e. the problem wasn't 
Finance::Quote per se).

My thoughts are:

1) if someone is doing intra-day trading or similar then they shouldn't 
be using GnuCash to get prices, I see GnuCash getting prices as a weekly 
, once a day at most, idea of what my stuff may be worth.

2) Is the perceived problem

2.i)       Finance::Quote itself?

2.ii)      Finance::Quote needing perl? (fine for me but maybe not for all)

2.iii)     Finance::Quote not meeting the needs of users in adaptation 
to scraped sources changing?

2.iv)      Something else?

3) perl can be trimmed down to only the necessary bits, that can be made 
part of the install (a minimalistic perl is very small)

4) we can presume most people have some sort of Java (rather than, say, 
perl or python) on their systems these days and try approaching the 
author of getquote to see if he is interested in playing with our project.

5) we make GnuCash's price source independent of source by defining an 
interface.  i.e. the user uses their preferred price source and presents 
it to GnuCash in an agreed format.  this will involve simple helper 
scripts as I see it.

Any thoughts on this?

To some extent I am trying to defuse the "GnuCash is broken because it 
won't get the stuff for my shares" thing as there is more to it than that.


-- 
Wm ...
Other GnuCash interests, right now: External Budgeting