Building 1.4.10

[Bill Gribble]

On Tue, Jan 30, 2001 at 12:39:13PM -0800, Leo L. Schwab wrote:
> <RANT DEGREE="MILD">
> 	GnuCash has to be the most complex software package I've ever
> encountered.  Its cross-dependencies on a dozen different big, non-standard
> components is tremendously daunting, even to an old experienced hand such as
> myself.  When simply *building* a package becomes this complex, the task of
> making it reliable, IMHO, becomes asymptotically hard.
> </RANT>

Gnucash is a complicated piece of software with lots of functionality.
Despite that fact, there are constant requests for new features from
users and developers.  ATM gnucash doesn't have half the features I
think it ought to have.  I'm not planning on stopping adding them any
time soon.  And i'm certainly not going to reinvent the wheel for
features that are already in somebody else's library.

Building any full featured application is a PITA.  Tried to compile
Emacs for yourself lately?  a CVS version of Gnumeric?  Gnucash isn't
as big as either of them, nor is it as hard to build.  Pick a single
feature or dependency of Gnucash and tell me why it should be removed;
I'm in favor of less bloat, but not of less functionality.

We depend on bleeding edge functionality of GNOME and not much else;
i.e. if you have complete GNOME development environment, building
gnucash is no harder than any other GNOME application.  We are coding
for the upcoming GNOME 2.0 release rather than the stable GNOME API,
which is a point that we could argue about, but at least we aren't
using BONOBO.  Say, that gives me an idea... :)

Bill Gribble