Will GnuCash ever work for me?

Bill Gribble grib@linuxdevel.com
18 Sep 2001 13:57:43 -0500


On Tue, 2001-09-18 at 13:28, Derek A. Neighbors wrote:
> However, my interest comes not only as a user but as a developer.  I was 
> hoping to make some headway on getting GNUe to talk to GNUCash as a 
> backend.  In light of the current situation, it makes it difficult 
> seeing how I cant get current GNUCash to work and wouldnt want to 
> venture trying to get GNUe folks to get it working. :(

I haven't watched this thread closely enough to see what your particular
problem is, but I just can't imagine that you wouldn't be able to build
gnucash from source if you have a Gnome development environment
installed.  It ain't *that* hard. 

In any case, you don't need most of Gnucash to do what you want,
probably.  You just want the engine and the backends... no Gnome stuff
at all. If you have glib and guile you can build that (see below about
modules).

As for talking to Gnucash as a backend, I am just about finished with an
XML-RPC front end for Gnucash that will let any xml-rpc client set up a
remote Gnucash session and drive it.  It's for a particular project and
I didn't really think it was of wide interest; let me know if that's not
the case. 

> Could you not make each of these 'components'.  In the microsoft world 
> and now in the gnome world this is becoming common staple.  In use of 
> (activeX, dll) or shared objects.  I would assume this is advantegeous 
> anyhow.  This way you could modify Graphing or Reporting Support by just 
> upgrading a shared object opposed to having to patch all of gnucash.  

We're in the process of doing this, but pulling all the pieces apart is
a PITA.  We have a module system called 'gnc-module' that's wrapped
around lt_dlopen and friends.  Right now, you can get separate modules
for the module system, the engine, the register, and a few other
things... and then the Gnome stuff, including graphing and printing, is
one giant .a glommed on the end of the link line. dave_p has done a
great job of whittling away at that glom but it will take some more time
to get finished, and then to update the build process to allow things to
be configured and built separately.

b.g.