[GNC-dev] Feedback on GnuCash 3.903

[mark sattolo]

I am on Linux Mint 19.3 Cinnamon. I started using Gnc 3.903 yesterday
morning. This is a version I built from git using tag '3.903' on June 2. It
built without any problems, so I assumed it was good, but now it occurs to
me that all these problems may just be due to a problem with my build. But
I thought i would report now anyway just in case there are general issues
with this version. I was actually going to try a flatpak build of 3.903,
but I couldn't tell from any of the build names in Gnucash flatpak repo
<https://code.gnucash.org/builds/flatpak/> which one is for version 3.903.

Anyway, everything seemed fine with 3.903 until I opened one of my saved
reports. The appearance of the report was essentially unrecognizable. I
only ever use my saved reports and their appearance hasn't changed for
years, for any other Gnucash version (release or maint) until 3.903. So I
went in to the report *options* to see if I could restore the layout to
what i was used to:

Commodities tab:
there is a new Common Currency checkbox at the top, which was unchecked,
and everything below was greyed out. But the two checkboxes 'Show original
currency amount' and 'Show exchange rates' were both checked, even though
in my original options, the previous two checkboxes on this tab: 'Show
foreign currencies' and 'Show exchange rates' were both saved as *unchecked*.
So, checking the Common Currency box to ungrey the other options and then
unchecking the currency and exchange rate boxes, restored the layout of the
report to basically what I was familiar with, as it no longer had long
lists of commodities under essentially every sub-total.

General tab:
the report I was looking at, which I run often, is a balance sheet for all
my accounts, for date 'Today'. The old options had a select list titled
'Balance sheet date' which was set to the relative date of Today. The new
options have a Start Date and an End Date. The Start Date is greyed out, so
I guess it is fairly easy to figure out that since it doesn't make sense to
have two dates for a Balance, that the End Date is the active one.
Unfortunately, the date shown in 'End Date' was not 'Today' but had been
changed to 'End of accounting period'... So I changed it back to 'Today' to
get the proper balance date as it had been before.

Other problems:
1) There used to be a final total for the credit side of 'Total Liabilities
and Equity', which would match the Total Assets line if the balance was
done properly (sometimes it doesn't balance which means that I have created
some new accounts in the meantime and have to update the saved config), but
this line was missing and I tried every option I could find to restore it,
but nothing worked. Which means to ensure your balance is actually working,
you have to add on your own the Total Liability and Total Equity lines and
compare this to Total Assets.
So, just from looking, I could tell the actual totals were close, and I
thought they would balance, but when I did the addition, the total of
Liability + Equity matched the expected total from previous Gnucash
versions, but the Total Assets was now reporting an amount different, by
$0.03. Nothing I did to update the included accounts would resolve this
difference. I'm pretty sure I don't have a renegade asset account hidden
somewhere with $0.03 in it... Differences of this magnitude I find are
usually rounding errors. But not sure what this is or where it is coming
from.

2) When I saw the changes in the report options of version 3.903, I made
sure that I *didn't* press the 'Save Config' button so it wouldn't
overwrite my existing config for this report. Later, I opened the old 3.10
released version so I could see exactly how the options were set up in the
previous Gnucash, and when I opened the saved report 'Balance Today', all
the options had been changed to the incorrect ones that I had seen with
version 3.903, e.g. the date was changed from Today to 'End of accounting
period', the boxes for currency and exchange rates were now checked, etc.
And in fact the file 'saved-reports-2.8' had been completely overwritten by
v3.903 and all my dozens of saved reports now had incorrect settings. Maybe
this is the expected behavior? But it was certainly unexpected to me... I
had to go into my Timeshift and get the most recent backup of
'saved-reports-2.8' to restore all my settings.

Hope all this is clear, and helpful. Let me know if you have any questions.

*Mark Sattolo*
*mh.satto at gmail.com <mh.satto at gmail.com>*
*(613) 447-5385*


On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 3:05 PM John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:

>
>
> > On Jun 1, 2020, at 11:51 AM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
> >
> > The GnuCash development team announces GnuCash 3.903, the first testing
> release for what will soon be GnuCash 4.0.
>
> A further note for developers: This release begins Feature Freeze, please
> commit only bug fix changes until we release 4.0.
>
> String freeze is in two weeks, so if you have any commits that will
> require new or changed translatable strings get them in ASAP!
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-announce mailing list
> gnucash-announce at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-announce
>