[GNC-dev] Conditions to move revamped GnuCash Mobile App to GnuCash org

[Geert Janssens]

Hi Daniel,

Generally it would be great to have a gnucash presence on mobile devices.

As John I also welcome more presence and interaction in the gnucash mailing lists by people 
interested in maintaining GfA concerning use and development of that app. That would 
really kickstart the integration in the larger gnucash community as a whole in a more natural 
way. Your current request is a good initiative in that respect by the way.

My other concern is that currently gnucash and GfA don't share a single line of code. Other 
than the intention to be compatible they are two fully independent projects. That's 
unfortunate.

To be fair, at the time Ngewi did the GfA summer of code that was not feasible as much of 
that core functionality relied on code that is hard to port to Android, in particular parts were 
written in guile (a scripting language) and most of it depended (and still does) on glib2.

We are currently at a point that guile is mostly eliminated from the core functionality. I don't 
know how difficult it is these days to use glib2 on Android. However I see other glib2 based 
projects being ported (like vlc) so apparently it's doable.

It has always been my view that the core functionality should be shared between all gnucash 
implementations (desktop, mobile, ...). I believe that's important for solid long-term 
compatibility and interoperability across the board. It would also reduce maintenance of the 
app in the long-term as more bits of code are shared. This is also the reason I have kept 
pushing to eliminate all guile dependencies from the core functionality for years. The effort 
has paid off IMO.

So for GfA to really become *gnucash* for android, I would really like to see it work towards 
more code sharing with gnucash. Otherwise it remains a companion app and should clearly 
be marketed as such. The name currently used is misleading.

All that to say IMO it's important to clearly define the goal of the GfA project: either it aims to 
truly become gnucash on Android (reusing core functionality) or it decides to remain a 
companion app (properly named to reflect that).

Other than that I can only encourage renewed interest in GfA (or an iOS sibling)!

Regards,

Geert

Op donderdag 29 september 2022 02:09:53 CEST schreef Daniel Brown:
> Hello GnuCash devs,
> 
> does someone here have (had) a relation to the gnucash-android project?
> I couldn't find a way to contact the mainter "codinguser" and the project is
> abandoned: https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/GnuCash_and_Mobile_Devices
> 
> Recently there have been a couple of people (including me) who would like to
> contribute/maintain/fork/rewrite the project to keep it alive:
> https://github.com/codinguser/gnucash-android/issues/913
> 
> I have started a couple of steps to revive the project and will try to
> establish a new leading fork so that all the open contributions can find
> its way into the app. And as part of this revamp I would consider aligning
> the project to gnucash.org
> 
> What would be necessary, to move and continue the project under the gnucash
> org in the future?
> 
> I mean not only GitHub organization, but it would would be great to see the
> project as an official part of the community, with vendor "GnuCash" in the
> app store, mailing-list for support and so on.
> 
> 
> Best Regards
> Daniel
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