Unintended consequences / retrograde behaviour re 2.6.16 fix of Bug 603379 - Prevent changing some Account Options if it has transactions.

[Christopher Lam]

Not sure how much this adds to the discussion, but a long time ago, as a
user new to job market and accounting in general, I was expensing my
pension contributions. As a salaried employee, and as a new contractor, I
was categorizing them as Expenses:Pension

Now I know these belong in the assets column. It was a quick job to
reparent the Retirement account from Expenses to Assets. Agree with Wm if
this is disabled then the gnucash beautiful ability to grow into our mental
model will be lost.

Perhaps we just need to ensure the commodities are immutable, whereas
account type can change... as long as they're not stock/fund/business
accounts.

On 3 May 2017 at 08:11, Wm via gnucash-devel <gnucash-devel at gnucash.org>
wrote:

> On 24/04/2017 23:31, Wm via gnucash-devel wrote:
>
> [apparent ff to self]
>
> I have a message from JohnR that I think may have been intended for this
> list.
>
> It makes sense to me for other people to see it and hear him before I
> represent my case on immutability.
>
> ===
>
> I think account types *are* immutable in formal accounting, but I'm open
> to changing my mind if you can suggest some use-cases where it's allowed.
>
> To ensure that we're talking about the same thing, the account types
> are: Asset, with subclasses  Bank, Stock, Mutual Fund, and Cash;
> Liability, with subclass Credit Card; Equity, with subclasses Income and
> Expense; and special types that are for GnuCash's internal use Payable,
> Receivable, and Trading. There are some others declared in the code that
> aren't exposed anywhere so they don't count.
>
> I'll stipulate that Stock and Mutual Fund behave exactly the same, as do
> Bank and Cash, so those four should be collapsed into two.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>
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