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

Adrien Monteleone adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net
Thu Apr 9 22:14:51 EDT 2020


Thank You! This makes it so much easier to test. I’ll give the flatpak a spin and see what I find. I still haven’t set up a build environment for Mac yet. (and watching a recent thread on the subject makes it look daunting compared to Linux)

This is a busy weekend for me though. What kind of time frame do you have and is there something in particular you’re looking to find. (other than just loosely that the totals appear to work)

Regards,
Adrien

> On Apr 9, 2020 w15d100, at 9:10 PM, Christopher Lam <christopher.lck at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.
>> 
> _______________________________________________
> 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