Will GnuCash ever work for me?

[Linas Vepstas]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 04:14:10PM -0500, Derek Neighbors was heard to remark:
> > 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)

Well, there's no practical way of doing this.  Take, for example, 
printing.  We can support printing simply & easily by using gnome-print.  
Or we can try to implement it on our own, using a bizarre hack 
involving latex, sgml, ghostscript and what-not that would have been 
difficult and a hack job.

Graphing: the choice was to use guppi, and save a lot of work,  or 
use some other package, and put a lot of effort into it. Or not support
graphing at all.  It would be insane to use guppi in the new version,
*and* hack up something else for graphing in the older version.

The third alternative, waiting for guppi to mature before supporting
graphing at all, seems the worst option of all.

--linas