installing gnucash on Red Hat

Derek Martin ddm@pizzashack.org
Mon, 10 Sep 2001 18:49:11 -0400


O.k. I'm trying to install gnucash on RH 7.1 and I'm having some
trouble tracking down some of the dependencies.  One example is
GtkHTML -- the link to the site works, but there's little there, and
no apparent download links.  I'm using a default install of RH 7.1
WITHOUT Ximian; I refuse to install it because what ever Miguel and
Co. did to Ximian breaks Quake III and a few other things that I don't
remember.  I seem to recall gnumeric being one of the tthings that
broke when I upgraded to Ximian from Helix, but I can't remember for
certain...

So I guess I should start with the question, is it actually possible
to install and run gnucash on a system which doesn't have Gnome 1.4?

I've used earlier versions of gnucash, and I think you guys are doing
a great job.  This is good software that fills a definite need in the
Linux community.

I'd also like to attempt to offer a constructive comment though, which
is that as good as it is, gnucash represents much of what I (and lots
of other people) find annoying (to varying degrees) about open source
software development.  Specifically, that it is developed against and
dependent upon obscure libraries or bleeding-edge versions of
libraries that pretty much everyone is guaranteed not to have.  It's
great to be able to run the latest and greatest versions of stuff, but
not everyone has time to deal with the endless cycle of upgrades.
Some of us have real jobs...  ;-)  I suppose it's too late, but it
would be fantastic if all you Free code jockeys would get yourselves a
build system running software that people are likely to have (like
say, the previous generation of some Linux distribution) and develop
and build on that.

That, and from poking through some of the source files, it seems that
much of the code is completely devoid of comments, which means if I'd
like to help you develop the software, it will take me 10 times as
long to get started because I now have to read virtually every line of
code to figure out how things work and you're doing.  Linus' theory
that if you can't read the code you shouldn't be mucking about in it
is all well and good; however a few well-placed comments drastically
improve readability and understanding and shorten ramp-up time for
newcomers -- even extremely skilled ones (which I'm not claiming to
be).

O.k., I'll shut up now. Thanks for your help, the code, and for
putting up with my rant.  =8^)

-- 
---------------------------------------------------
Derek Martin          |   Unix/Linux geek
ddm@pizzashack.org    |   GnuPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D
Retrieve my public key at http://pgp.mit.edu