New Person Questions

[Aaron Goldblatt]

I have a couple of questions that I haven't been able to find sufficient
answers for in the documentation or elsewhere, and I beg your pardon if
they fall into the FAQ category.

I've seen in the past that the totals for gnucash accounts accumulate as
one might expect, but in expense accounting the totals can become
irritatingly large over a period of time.

For example, I drive a lot (several hundred miles a day sometimes) and
so I spend a lot of money on fuel.  I account for this as
Expense:Auto:Gas.  But since I never get money back from that account
into a cash or bank account, the total sinks lower and lower, with no
end in sight.

Over a couple of years, the usefulness of this display becomes dubious
at best.

How can I set up an accounting period so that accounts that should be
zeroed (like expense accounts) or accounts that shouldn't be zeroed
(like bank checking accounts) can have older transactions hidden from
immediate view?   Archival of past balances and multi-period reporting
would also be most helpful.  Does such functionality exist, and if so,
what is it called so I can RTFM about it?

===

Next question:  I'm using 1.6.5 packaged for SuSE Linux 8.0.  (Is there
a 1.6.6 version around somewhere that someone has actually gotten to
compile?)  When choosing some of the reports (Reports:Utility:Welcome
Extravaganza, Reports:A&L:Net Worth Bar Chart, and others), GnuCash
crashes without error or a core file.  No log entry, doesn't clean up
the file handles, just crash-go-boom.

What did I not install, is this behavior a known issue, and all that
other good stuff someone who doesn't program might want to know about a
program that crashes?  Or should I go on a bug-hunting trek in some very
useful reports?

===

Third and final question for this message:

Is there an archive of gnucash-user and gnucash-devel that has a decent
search facility?  Downloading the entire mbox gives me all the mail, but
makes it difficult to +search +on terms that +aren't +consecutive "like
my fine example" +here.  Searching the mbox for "mailing list archive"
got a number of hits, none of which answered this question.  :)

Thank you most kindly.

ag