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

[Geert Janssens]

On woensdag 3 mei 2017 10:02:44 CEST Geert Janssens wrote:
> >> On May 2, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Wm via gnucash-devel
> >> <gnucash-devel at gnucash.org> wrote:
> > Derek, Geert, and I discussion about this on IRC the other day and both
> > disagree with me. I think Geert is looking into how to restore the
> > account type selector and block type changes between STOCK/FUND and
> > everything else.
> 
> I believe you are correct accounts are immutable in formal accounting. In
> formal accounting transactions are immutable as well. Yet we allow users to
> change transactions if they choose not to adhere to formal accounting rules.
> In that sense I believe we can also allow users to do the same with
> accounts if they choose to do so, at least within reasonable limits.
> These limits are:
> - the commodity shouldn't be changed. It wouldn't make sense that an account
> that was tracking USD suddenly starts tracking EUR. The values wouldn't
> match consistently.
> - GnuCash makes certain assumptions about Accounts Receivable and Accounts
> Payable account types and stores more information in those internally than
> in other account types. Changing types on these accounts would violate
> these assumptions and/or would lose the added information. To avoid these
> changing account types to/from A/R and A/P should not be allowed.
> - John also mentions the Trading account type. While it's an internal use
> type as well I don't know much about the assumptions gnucash makes on these
> account types nor whether changing an account to/from such a type would
> affect gnucash' proper functioning or not. Nor can I imagine a use case
> where it would make sense to change to/from a trading account. They are
> generated automatically when needed.

Oh, and I meant to add I'm not working on this issue (yet). As Robert Fewell 
is the original author of the previous patch I was kind of hoping he would 
pick it up :)

If not, I will handle it.

Regards,

Geert