[GNC-dev] taxtxf

[Christopher Lam]

Hi Alex
Thank you for work years ago.
My aim is to try clean up the various reports, and improve the coding style
to gnu emacs style.
Example style is at
https://github.com/christopherlam/gnucash/blob/maint-balsheet-pnl/gnucash/report/standard-reports/balsheet-pnl.scm
-> while this particular multicol balancesheet is IMO working (and all's
well except I'm not 100% sure of capital-gains), I think it must be more
modularised internally to be more maintainable prior to being merge-quality.
I think taxtxf.scm is suffering from many issues - NO tests, old guile
style, too many hard-coded assumptions. I think I can fix them but would
need a good datafile (and I can't generate one due to bug as shown), and a
summary of its assumptions would be good. There's work in progress at the
moment at
https://github.com/christopherlam/gnucash/blob/maint-txf-cleanup/gnucash/report/locale-specific/us/taxtxf.scm
but I'll wish to create good tests to ensure this work is safe.

On Sat, 5 Jan 2019 at 06:06, Alex Aycinena <alex.aycinena at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> Christopher,
>
>
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: Christopher Lam <christopher.lck at gmail.com>
>> To: GnuCash development list <gnucash-devel at gnucash.org>
>> Cc:
>> Bcc:
>> Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2019 10:48:23 +0800
>> Subject: [GNC-dev] taxtxf
>> Hi
>>
>> I'm thinking of tackling the huge beast that is taxtxf.scm but I'm
>> struggling to understand its various meandering code paths.
>>
>> If anyone is willing to share a sample datafile with accounts
>> appropriately tagged with tax-info then I'll try untangle this mess.
>>
>> I think there are some current bugs in UI - I can't even set the book
>> tax-info type properly in a new datafile, and cannot yet create tests.
>>
>> But a good datafile will be useful in the meantime.
>>
>> C
>>
>>
> I re-wrote the original US Income Tax Report several years ago and have
> maintained the reference data that it uses, which is in the file txf.scm,
> each year. I am waiting for a few more revised tax forms to be available
> before I can do the update for tax year 2018.
>
> The book tax info dialog worked until recently. It is reported as bug
> #796687. I have just been trying to debug the problem and think the problem
> is in qof_book_set_string_option, which was updated in March 2018, but
> haven't finished my analysis.
>
> John Ralls just committed a fix that was preventing the report from
> running. A couple of users reported that it runs with his fix (bug #797002).
>
> Short-term, getting the data updated for 2018, fixing 796687, and making
> sure the report runs and is accurate is the important thing.
>
> Long-term, while I'm sure the report can be improved, I believe the
> architecture for the whole US Income Tax reporting process is problematic
> and should be replaced. For this reason, I would suggest it may not be
> worthwhile to invest a lot of time in restructuring the report, without
> first addressing underlying issues.
>
> However, if you want to go ahead and do so, please feel free to ask me any
> questions you want and I will be happy to work with you on it.
>
> Regards,
>
> Alex
>