Mortgages and other "loan" types?

[Dave Peticolas]

 writes:
> It's been rumoured that Dave Peticolas said:
> > > The recommended way of accessing either file format is to use
> > > the libgnc_engine api.  The API is guarenteed to
> > > read/write/manipulate the data in a slef-consistent manner.  
> > > We use swig to build it into a perl module to make it accessible to
> > > perl scripts. See gnc-prices for a sample perl script.
> > 
> > Err, the perl API is deprecated and was actually removed from devel CVS.
> 
> I thought it was moved to the 'optional' directory, or something like
> that? 

It was, but it was becoming more & more out-of-date (see below), so we
removed it. Some people on this list expressed interest in taking it
up & we agreed it should be a separate project (like Finance::Quote).
Before removing it, I tagged cvs with 'last-of-swig' so it's easy to
get back out.


> > Anyone who wants to take up the standard of perl interoperation is welcome
> > to, but some work is required in order to bring the old implementation
> > up to date with the changes in the engine api.
> 
> ? 
> The whole point of 'swig' is that it crawls through your C header
> files and automatically 'guesses' the API.  So there shouldn't be any
> porting work there ...

That's the theory, but reality is not as pretty. Now we use glib types
(GLists, etc.) everywhere in the engine and that means adding wrapper
functions so that perl scripts can access them (swig can only wrap
them as opaque types).

Also, there is some hackage there to deal with perl5.6 vs perl5.1.
Swig hasn't had a stable release in a *long* time.

dave