cutecash ([RFC] GTK+ 3 Migration - Alpha-grade Patchset)

[Christian Stimming]

Am Montag, 22. Februar 2016, 21:03:30 schrieb John Ralls:
> Cutecash is a demo. It implements only part of GnuCash and while Christian
> tidies things up periodically to keep it working it has never become a
> serious alternative to Gtk. I think that that's because of the MVC
> violations I mentioned earlier, but only Christian really knows. When
> Christian wrote it we were still using subversion and it wasn't feasible
> for him to put it anywhere but in the main tree. Now with Git he'd probably
> have it on his personal Github repo.

Yes, cutecash was "just" a demo. For me, it was a test case in 2010 whether 
Qt/C++ would have been a viable alternative for further UI programming. The 
result of the test case after a few weeks was that this is indeed possible. 
However, unfortunately there was zero interest around here in using Qt/C++ as 
a UI programming language (except for the single GSoC project) , and thus I 
abandoned that experiment, too. To my surprise the application still compiled 
until recently. The cutecash compile targets were silently dropped last 
december in favor of building gnucash itself by cmake, which in turn is surely 
a good step.

But no, the Qt frontend did not have problems because of MVC violations 
primarely. Instead, the main problem is that we have just such an insanely 
large set of various features which all need their little UI here and there, 
which would have to be ported one by one by one into a new UI toolkit iff one 
wants to keep each and every of them in a new version of the program. The Qt 
frontend could have been used right away if there were a demand for a faster 
UI or somebody would have implemented some cool new requested feature only in 
the Qt frontend, so that the benefit of switching would have outweighed the 
drop in feature number. But this didn't happen... even though the Qt frontend 
immediately had a full Undo/Redo feature with history, something we still 
don't have in the C register because C sucks so much. Oh well.

Regards,

Christian