gnucash maint: Correct the Stock, Bond, Market Index, and Mutual Fund account types.

[John Ralls]

> On Sep 17, 2015, at 7:51 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> I think that there was an expectation (at least mine) that these trees
> would create not just the brokerage hierachy but also an example
> commodity account within that brokerage and not necessarily expect the
> user to do "more" to add a stock/fund/bond account.  Yes, I'm including
> bond here even though there is no "bond" type account -- it's still a
> type of security even if there's no specific type for it.
> 
> Personally I'd rather see the hierarchy assistant change to make the
> user create/select the security.  Otherwise the UX changes in a negative
> way:  they run the hierarchy assistant and then they STILL have to
> create a new stock/bond/fund account!

Well, yes. One hopes he’ll have to create several, as a single-security portfolio is very unwise indeed unless it’s a whole-market ETF like VTI. It’s unlikely that anyone’s portfolio consists of one stock, one bond, one “Market Index” (an index ETF, I suppose), and one Mutual Fund. Most users will also have to create securities and accounts over time as their portfolios change. Meanwhile the template creates those 4 accounts with an illegal combination of account type and commodity namespace. It’s hardly a negative change to fix that.

Regardless of what some future hierarchy assistant does about helping a user set up her initial portfolio, the current account templates have a bug: They create accounts of type STOCK and MUTUAL with an illegal commodity namespace, ISO4217. The hierarchy assistant we have doesn’t know how to guide the user through creating the correct security and assign it to the provided accounts, never mind renaming the account to match the security, so we need to fix the templates to work with what we have. There are two choices: Make the accounts a type that legally uses ISO4217 commodities or remove them altogether. Either is fine with me.

Regards,
John Ralls