[GNC-dev] About budgets in 3.8, 3.9 and 3.10

[Christopher Lam]

2020-04-07 nightly available at https://code.gnucash.org/builds/win32/maint/
flatpaks available at https://code.gnucash.org/builds/flatpak/maint/ - use
between 2020-04-04 and 2020-04-10

On Fri, 10 Apr 2020 at 01:38, Christopher Lam <christopher.lck at gmail.com>
wrote:

> This topic is about budgets.
>
> We now know that budgets are currently inherently flawed: they *assume*
> that sign-reversal = credit-accounts, and do not work well at all with any
> other sign-reversal option. In addition, there was a feature request (bug
> 781345) that introduced budget equity into the equation, and I still do not
> know whether a budget equity amount is a correct approach.
>
> In 4.x series there is a planned *fix* which will scan budget amounts,
> use heuristics to determine the most likely sign-reversal approach used
> during budget creation, internally unreverse the amounts, and upgrade the
> datafile so that it cannot be damaged by 3.7 or earlier.
>
> Therefore 3.8 was the first release which could handle both old and fixed
> budget amounts. Unfortunately, the interpretation of budget signs was/is
> very difficult, which explained the switch to
> asset/liability/equity/income/expense totals, which are impervious to
> budget signs. Unfortunately users missed the "Remaining to Budget" facility.
>
> Therefore 3.9 was, during development, tested with
> https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/pull/630 and was deemed "good enough"
> to fix to restore the remaining to budget total. Unfortunately the
> liability budget amount issue was tested incorrectly.
>
> For a week, the git-maint contained a candidate fix, discussed in
> https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=797659 -- but there is
> insufficient beta testing on the budgets for now. So, 3.10 will retain 3.9
> behaviour unless the fix is fully tested.
>
> Conclusion: this is a call for beta testers, using the 2020-04-07 nightly
> (the only one with the fix), to test both their datafiles and the
> *4.x-featured* datafile attached in the bug report. Please *especially*
> test the liability and equity totals, both with existing datafile and
> featured datafile.
>
> Flame away. I will try to be available throughout the day for testing.
> Win32 users have only 1 build to test, Linux users may also build from
> 882fd22ca rather than git-maint which has returned to 3.9 behaviour. I'm
> not sure how MacOS users can test.
>