g-wrap lost - So am I

[Daniel Brahneborg]

On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 10:00:24AM +0200, Christian Stimming wrote:
> David Tangye wrote:
> 
> > Get the idea?
> 
> Sure. Why don't you bug your favorite distributor until they provide you 
> a CD that comes with everything you need on it? After all, that's what 
> distributors are for.
> 
> I have no problem in admitting that application developers can't do the 
> job of the distributors. For various reasons -- the fact that developers 
> are precisely "techies" being not the least of them. So, sure, I totally 
> agree with you, but it's just not our job to provide the 
> one-click-works-instantly packages. That's the job of the distributors. [1]
> 
> Christian

<rant>
Well, one thing developers _can_ do is try to avoid or fix
tools and toolkits that aren't good enough for mainstream use.
For me, using RedHat 7.3, this basically means GConf.

I wrote a few weeks ago about not being able to start gnucash
as any other user than root, which looked like a GConf problem.
I searched the archives a little bit, but found nothing.
Now I've given up, and simply uses the root account, which is
a highly unsatisfactory situation.  I'm running a tight
LIDS kernel, so I'm not too worried though.

With Galeon the situation was even worse.  I found a million
replies saying "remove some file and reinstall gconf", which
didn't help at all.  Galeon refuses to start at all, and
gnucash still only works when I'm root.

Nobody seems to know what the actual problem with GConf is,
since the suggested solutions are just another versions of
"restart your computer".  It's much worse than having to
hunt down dozens of unrelated packages (where half of the
URL's doesn't work), as David described.  Getting gnucash,
and therefore also GConf, to work also requires half a
dozen long and cryptic shell commands, where the paths
differ depending on who wrote the description.  This is
definately not a job for distributors.

There's a beauty in getting a program to be installable in
a zillion different operation system configurations, not
just the latest Debian release (which all Real Cool
Developers use, as I've understood it).  Make the program
adapt to its environment, not the other way around.  Make
it work with different versions of the necessary libraries,
not just the latest and greatest.  Make the required list
of libraries as short as possible.  If I don't need a
certain feature which needs an unusual library, which do
I have to install it?  If this isn't a job for developers,
I don't know what is.  People who use RedHat aren't less
worthy as human beings, which seems what most Debian folks
seems to think.  Sure, apt-get is great.  I still want to
keep my RedHat installation, but why should that limit the
number of applications I can use?

Since I like the functionality part of gnucash I've been
thinking of rewriting the gui in Qt (with or without Kde),
which has never given me any of these problems.
Unfortunately I don't have the time.
</rant>

Gnucash-gui-question: Why isn't the "description" field in
the account list maximized (in a "use the rest of the space"
kind of way) by default?

/Basic