Will GnuCash ever work for me?

[Derek Neighbors]

> I can't promise that this won't happen again.  It may or may not. It
> depends on what new features gnucash will need, and what new features
> that other bleeding edge libraries will be providing.  And it depends on
> how quickly the existing distributions psupport the new libraries.
> Although its been painful to front-run, if we hadn't, then gnucash 1.6
> today wouldn't be as sophisticated as it is.  Meanwhile, I've found that
> 1.4 works great for most of my needs.  And if it happens again, then
> stick to 1.6.  Don't upgrade until your base distro has upgraded.

Have you considered running features in two versions?  Its more work but
doesnt alienate slow adopters (teh majority of users)

I.E. if you have a new feature that can be in both the new and old version
(not an architecutral upgrade) make it in HEAD and merge to your older
tree, but if say a new feature is taking advantage of some new feature of
a new package it would only go in HEAD.

I agree with most of what you said, except your analogy breaks down
because windows only gets released every few years.  Red Hat etc generally
are released much more often, but the 'issues' of dependencies for gnucash
are much more package related than distro related.  Having a 'newer'
distro just helps.  

To be fair to gnucash I think we will see this problem occur more and
more.  I think ximian is hitting this problem as well.

Derek