Customer vs Company

[Dale Alspach]

I am not one of the developers so feel free to ignore this or explain why I
am wrong.

I would argue that going off in the direction of LDAP is a mistake.
You have in development another version of gnucash that uses a database.
Once everything is in database tables any database tools available to
generate reports, queries, etc., will be available to extract data from
the database independent of gnucash (provided the table structure is not
so convoluted as to make the nearly complete understanding of gnucash
itself necessary to query the database usefully).

A useful description of the database tables and the dependencies will
need to be provided and, most important, a set of rules for acceptable
modification of the data. I think it is perfectly OK to say that
modifications to transactions are at the user's risk. On the other hand
modifications to other data, e.g., names and addresses, should not cause
any problems provided the existence, data type and size requirements are
met. Implicit in this approach is that the structure of the tables will
be modified in later versions of gnucash only when there is critical
need for further development and that such modifications will be well
advertised so that any user or third party developed queries, reports,
etc., can be modified to accomodate the changes.

For the developers there may be a huge gain from going this route.
Generating reports and printing are probably the two weakest features of
gnucash. I am not familiar enough with postgres to know but I presume that
there are already sufficient tools available to allow users to do their own
reports from query results using whatever spreadsheet, wordprocessing, ..,
software they choose. Thus the gnucash developers can put their energy into
other features of gnucash and only provide a reasonable basic set of
reports in gnucash. www.gnucash.org could provide links/storage for user/third
party quering and reporting tools and help. (And some scripts for
synchronizing data between an LDAP server and gnucash. ;))

Dale Alspach