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

[Christopher Lam]

On Fri, 10 Apr 2020, 10:20 am Christopher Lam, <christopher.lck at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Deadline is 11 April at noon GMT, so, about 34 hours from now.
>
> For both: *existing* datafile and especially *4.x-featured *datafile (in
> bug report).
>
> Please test:
> - creation of budget amounts
> - use estimate to prefill cells
> - all totals in all 5 account types A/L/Inc/Exp/Eq behave appropriately
>

Addendum this is not simply an arithmetic test; it *****must**** also
confirm that the totals and signs are sensible for the purpose of
budgeting. Hence the difficulty of a one person coder to make it work. For
example, we can budget a liability account regularly until we have enough
deposit for a huge loan, or we can budget a liability account regularly for
the loan repayments. IIUC both approaches are "valid" but the signs will be
opposite. Other counter examples likely exist.

- budget.scm report (optionally other budget reports but these are lower
> priority) and especially difference column.
>
> On Fri, 10 Apr 2020 at 02:16, Adrien Monteleone <
> adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>> >>
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> > gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
>> > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
>> >
>>
>>
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