[GNC-dev] How to contribute to GnuCash?

[John Ralls]

What Geert meant is that our current engine code *isn't* particularly portable, though I think that since it compiles OK on MacOS it shouldn't have too much trouble with iOS either. It's a mix of C and C++ and the main dependencies are Boost and Gnome Glib; the XML file backend also depends on libxml2 and the SQL backend depends on libdbi. 

The public mirror for our git repository is at https://github.com/gnucash/gnucash. Note that the stable branch is "maint". Doxygen API docs are at https://code.gnucash.org/docs/MAINT.

Regards,
John Ralls

> On Apr 26, 2019, at 12:56 PM, John <john at vicinno.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for bringing it up. A portable engine code is definitely more meaningful. Can you point me at some document or source code on portable engine code? we just want to get more details and estimate the work load.
> 
> Thanks,
> John
> 
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 9:33 AM Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> An iOS companion app would be great.
> 
> The android app took the approach of reimplementing all the business logic 
> required to read (and write?) a gnucash data file rather than using the 
> gnucash engine code.
> 
> I can understand why as the engine code is currently difficult to port to 
> different platforms. It is one of our goals to make this easier, but there's 
> still a lot of work ahead to get to that state.
> 
> If you feel like joining that effort it would be very welcome as a portable 
> engine would greatly benefit gnucash and all derived apps on all platforms 
> (including the android app and a future ios app).
> 
> Don't feel obliged of course. I did want to bring it up anyway so you know 
> this goal exists and may be useful for your app in the future.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> geert
> 
> Op donderdag 25 april 2019 17:41:00 CEST schreef John Ralls:
> > > On Apr 24, 2019, at 10:13 PM, John <john at vicinno.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > Hello,
> > > 
> > > I am the founder of a mobile app startup and a big fan of GnuCash.  My
> > > team
> > > has some free time now. I wonder if we can contribute to develop an iOS
> > > companion app like current Android one. Can you let me know if you think
> > > that's a good idea? and if yes, how to start?
> > > 
> > > Thanks,
> > > John
> > 
> > It's a good idea if you're going to commit to maintaining and supporting it
> > for a reasonable value of forever.  The GnuCash team hasn't the time nor
> > expertise to accept such an app as a contribution.
> > 
> > To get started I'd think it best to contact Ngewi via the
> > GnuCash-for-Android support channels and discuss whether his design is
> > portable to iOS and what lessons he's learned and improvements he might
> > make.
> > 
> > Once you're ready to start work I expect you'll want to recruit users for
> > usability testing of your UI mockups and later for beta-testing. I'm sure
> > some of our users will be interested in helping, though if you're
> > contemplating a commercial product you'll need to figure out the right way
> > to engage with a FLOSS community.
> > 
> > Regards,
> > John Ralls
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnucash-devel mailing list
> > gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
> > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> Thanks for choosing our apps,
> Vicinno,
> www.vicinno.com
> 
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