gnucash master: Book-Currency Feature step 1

[Mike Alexander]

> On Feb 9, 2015, at 4:18 PM, J. Alex Aycinena <alex.aycinena at code.gnucash.org> wrote:
> 
> Updated	 via  https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/commit/b22c6b6e (commit)
> 	from  https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/commit/9c8405da (commit)
> 
> 
> 
> commit b22c6b6eb9ab86273bfc7225cc50504f28158bc8
> Author: Alex Aycinena <alex.aycinena at gmail.com>
> Date:   Mon Feb 9 12:52:29 2015 -0800
> 
>    Book-Currency Feature step 1
> 
>    The changes made are:
> 
>         libqof/qof/qofbookslots.h - define Currency Accounting Method option; keep
>             the current Trading Accounts option (in order to read prior files)
>         libqof/qof/qofbook.cpp & .h - define function to determine if book uses
>             book-currency, modify function to determine if book uses trading
>             accounts and add gobject properties accordingly
>         libqof/qof/test/test-qofbook.c - define test function to determine if book
>             uses book-currency and modify test function for trading accounts
>         engine/test/utest-Split.cpp - modify test function for trading accounts
>             to use new "currency-accounting" and "trading" book properties
>         engine/test/utest-Transaction.c - modify test function for trading accounts
>             to use new "currency-accounting" and "trading" book properties
> 


Your comments imply that you might one day remove the trading account option.  Please don’t, and don’t deprecate the use of it.  Trading accounts have a number of advantages over forcing the use of a book currency and should not be removed.  Peter Selinger’s tutorial mainly talks about a “reference currency” to show how it doesn’t work as well as trading accounts.  In no way is he arguing that a reference currency is superior to trading accounts, although some situations may require the use of a reference currency anyway.  

I missed the discussion last October about this issue since I was out of the country without Internet access, but I fail to see why the issues you’re addressing couldn’t be fixed without such a drastic change.  If you want to implement this approach, go ahead, but do it in a way that doesn’t interfere with the way things work now.  That’s the approach I took with trading accounts (if you turn them off GnuCash works like they had never been implemented) and you should do the same here.

                 Mike