Scope of GNUCash

Adrien Monteleone adrien.monteleone at gmail.com
Tue Feb 13 22:31:39 EST 2018


Not sure what the current POTUS office holder has to do with anything related, but, whatever…

I was just in NOLA for a few days, now back home in Lafayette. Happiness is measured in beer, or something similar, here. I’ve had several beers today, so my happiness meter is reading high at the moment.

I have zero demands on the developer team. I hope they accomplish all they set out to. (and quickly!) But I’m thankful they’ve laid out a road map for me to decide where (and how) to hop on the train should I manage to chime in with something useful. (*note, validated code is useful, ideas? not so much)

For now, I’m going to attempt to tackle some report issues. Sure, I could wait till full SQL arrives, but that wouldn’t serve needs NOW. I don’t ‘want’ to learn scheme, but I’ll take one for the team if it means being able to offer some out of the box ‘features’ people keep asking for.

After that, or in the middle of doing so, I might decide to get my feet wet with GC code. I’d ‘like’ to work on things I want to see implemented, but I understand certain other tasks have to be taken care of first, most notably, the move to full C++ and GTK3. Once that is done, lots of legacy code and ways of doing things can or will be quickly discarded which will then clear the way for more ‘features’ that users are looking for. So when I do jump into code, my focus will always be to try to work on what the project needs, not what I need. If I can squash some bugs in the process, all the better.

Happy Mardi Gras,
Adrien

> On Feb 13, 2018, at 6:34 PM, Wm via gnucash-devel <gnucash-devel at gnucash.org> wrote:
> 
> On 13/02/2018 21:53, Matt Graham wrote:
>> 😊 I think I would love to sit down in a pub with the three of you (Wm, Adrien, and Mike). I think we could have such awesome semi-drunken discussions about the nature of life, the universe and everything!
> 
> I'm in London. Mike is in a Trump voting bit of Merka. Don't know where Adrien is and he shouldn't have to say.
> 
> Accounting is a way of measuring life.  Happiness is harder to quantify.  Life should be enjoyable and measuring money shouldn't occupy too much of our time.
> 
> Most crass philosophical sayings are also guaranteed to be crap.
> 
>> I think you have basically answered my question, and I think we all basically agree on the rough direction things *should* go in (separate interacting packages).
> 
> I'm the person arguing for stuff to be taken *out* of the basic package so the important stuff can more easily be better interpreted or used, the important stuff being the data that each of us owns or has responsibility for.
> 
> Meanwhile, since I have a good understanding of accounting and databases and related stuff, I just do the bits I need that gnc doesn't cover using plain text accounting.  My point in that regard being that almost all the *thought* problems have been solved in the plain text accounting universe and plain text accounting has also solved some problems you and I didn't even know existed and are way more esoteric than a budget being to your specific needs or a report being formatted one column to the left for the convenience of your tax accountant.
> 
> The problems have been solved, it is the presentation you are struggling with.
> 
> > I’m just not sure how to help make it happen (I’m an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to programming).
> 
> The gnc code is almost impenetrable in parts.  I'm considerably above average when it comes to programmings skills but there are, when I drill down, bits that simply don't parse.  I know exactly what the code is meant to be doing but someone has written it in such an obscure way I just give up and return to understanding the data.
> 
> It is *this* that the seniors are working on rather than adding a bell or a whistle.
> 
> If the code can't be brought into a form where more than a handful of people can understand it the project is going to die with the seniors as they naturally retire to caring more for their grandchildren than people on the internet thing that demand they do this or that.
> 
> You seem like one of the demanding people to me, Matt
> 
>> I think I’ll start by updating the budget part of the tuts and concept guide like I have promised elsewhere, and then start looking into how the C++ modules have been structured (to see what connection will be possible within the 3.0 releases).
> 
> 
> Ufff, you are welcome to try to understand the budgets but you are warned, you aren't the first to think it makes sense to contribute there.  You are also unlikely to succeed in explaining the way the existing budgets work to anyone's satisfaction, possibly even your own satisfaction.  I am not joking, by the time you have figured out how the existing budgets work you will already be wondering why they were included at all which brings us neatly back to you, Matt, wondering what the scope is, remember ?
> 
> I don't think you should be defining the scope for other people any more than me ... my wishlist is simple and if I don't get what I want I'm not going to cry because I can do my accounting in more than one way.
> 
> -- 
> Wm
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-devel mailing list
> gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel



More information about the gnucash-devel mailing list