Reference dates for net worth barchart

[Geert Janssens]

On Tuesday 03 November 2015 11:32:07 JD wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 11:27:20 +0200, JD wrote:
> > In my previous post I complained about the fact that the net worth
> > barchart sets each intermediate date to the end of the respective
> > intermediate day, rather than to the beginning of the intermediate
> > date. That seemed counterintuitive to me, at least for a monthly
> > report that starts on the first day of a month.
> > 
> > I now found a way to make the report as I would expect; see the
> > attached patch. Maybe it will be useful for others.
> 
> I extended my patch of the net worth barchart, it now includes an
> option for showing the net values in the bar labels.
> 
> Best,
> JD

Hi JD,

Thank you for sending a patch. Others have already pointed out the proper procedure is to use 
bugzilla or a pull request on github. I see that's what you did in follow-up, so thanks for that as 
well.

I have commented on one part of your patch already in bugzilla [1]. Further discussion on that 
part can continue on the bug report.

I'm replying here (and I moved the thread to gnucash-devel as this concerns gnucash 
development, not user questions) because I don't think the other part of your patch has a lot to 
do with the bug David Carlson pointed at [2] and I prefer to discuss it before asking you to 
create yet another bug.

The part of the patch I'm interested in here now is the part where you changed code to 
unconditionally use the start-day-time for the from-date, where it was using either start-day-
time or end-day-time depending on whether the report is for income/expense or not. Your patch 
may be correct, but I don't know because I have no idea why this distinction was there in the 
first place. I would like to hear if other users/devs know this before I apply your patch.

So does anyone know a good reason to use another start time for income-expense reporting vs 
other reports ? It has been like this since 2001 at least when the report was first introduced as a 
merger between "income-expense-graph.scm" and "net-worth-timeseries.scm" [3] by Christian 
Stimming. The former used day-start-time, the latter used day-end-time.

Geert

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=757637
[2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=639049
[3] https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/commit/e8a5a9677cfb0a1eaa7