[GNC-dev] alpha-testing budgets in 5.x

[Christopher Lam]

Experienced Users,

The upcoming 5.x series (master branch) currently has a one-time fix for
budgets to ensure they're internally stored as unreversed numbers.
Currently (up to 4.x) budgeting $1000 income into $600 expense and $400
liability repayment are stored as +1000, +600, +400. They should be stored
internally as -1000, +600, +400 amounts, as per usual accounting equation.
The internal numbers assume the reversal pref is "Credit Accounts". This
means the budgets are currently functioning well *only* if reversal
preference is set to credit-accounts

A obligatory one-time fix is suggested and applied on the master branch,
applying some heuristics and negating the numbers, and will render the
datafile unreadable on GnuCash prior to 3.7. It is *not* an option to make
the one-time fix optional, because this will mean maintaining two code
paths in perpetuity. However I'm not sure if it is debugged enough.

I'd like to ask experienced users to test from the master branch, either as
win32 nightlies https://code.gnucash.org/builds/win32/master/ (4-jan-2022
onwards) or building on linux, and report back of the new budget is *less*
buggy than in 4.x maint series. Please do NOT test master on your
production datafile.

If there are unsolvable bugs, then I'll suggest that the one-time fix
change must be undone, and someone else may decide to try again.

C