[GNC-dev] Dev's features of choice?

David Cousens davidcousens at bigpond.com
Sun Jul 26 21:47:26 EDT 2020


Jean,

As always the answer comes down to the available resources to carry out the work needed vs the complexity of carrying it
out. John has pointed out a number of barriers to being able to make GnuCash even more flexible  than it is currentlyand
facilitate addition of plugin capability for more specialized functionality, many of which are a consequence of the
history of its development. 

Much of the user base would I think prioritise the basic accounting functionality which is highly adaptable (the use in
many countries by a wide variety of amatuer and professional accountants and business attests to that) over nice but not
necessarily critical features. We will of course happily accept those if they become available but this is always
contingent on the availability of developers with the necessary expertise and sufficient understanding of the current
code base and its historical complexities as well as having the accounting background necessary. 

Some of the occasional contributors like myself were/are primarily users with a little coding experience (but not
professional developers) so our ability to contribute is limited by that as well as our available time. We rely on the
core development team for the hard work (which we all appreciate greatly) and overall development roadmap while we
mainly contribute around the edges.

I detect a healthy dollop of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" brigade in the mix as well but mostly they will
happily use new features if they meet their needs and then end up not knowing how they ever did without them. Such is
life!

David Cousens

On Sun, 2020-07-26 at 16:50 -0700, jean laroche wrote:
> But why???
> 
> 
> On 7/26/2020 3:38 PM, D. wrote:
> > Jean,
> > 
> > I think you raise a valid point. There does seem to be a tendency in the community to assume that a certain amount
> > of inconvenience is to be expected. The reasons vary, but the underlying tendency remains.
> > 
> > David T.
> > 
> > 
> > -------- Original Message --------
> > From: jean laroche <ripngo at gmail.com>
> > Sent: Sun Jul 26 17:49:47 EDT 2020
> > To: "Frank H. Ellenberger" <frank.h.ellenberger at gmail.com>
> > Cc: GnuCash Developer <gnucash-devel at gnucash.org>
> > Subject: Re: [GNC-dev] Dev's features of choice?
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > On 7/26/2020 1:54 PM, Frank H. Ellenberger wrote:
> > > Hi Jean,
> > > 
> > > Am 26.07.20 um 19:57 schrieb jean laroche:
> > > > I'm curious about something:
> > > > If you're a GC dev, contributing code to the project, what's the
> > > > feature(s) you'd like to see added to GC?
> > > > I'm only contributing a bit, but I'll offer my 3 top wishes:
> > > > - Undo/(redo)
> > > > - Multi-transaction (bulk) editing
> > > > - Multi-account (bulk) editing
> > > All three are violations of strict accounting rules. We often talk about
> > > "In the times of ink and paper", not graphite (pencils). Some
> > > governments require the immutabiity of once written records.
> > I see a disconnect here. Some of us (John in particular) insist that GC
> > is not a system for professionals, only for personal finance.
> > Yet, I always hear about accounting rules, and the way it should be done
> > by the book. If GC is really for the personal user, I don't understand
> > how we can survive without undo/redo, and multi-select. *every* piece of
> > software out there has these types of features, and they're invaluable.
> > J.
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnucash-devel mailing list
> > gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
> > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
> > 
> 
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-- 
Dr David R Cousens
B.Sc, M.Prof. Acc., Ph.D., G.C.Ed



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