Reminders

[Derek Atkins]

Robert Uhl <ruhl at 4dv.net> writes:

> Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> writes:
> > 
> > Maybe.  I'm not convinced it's worth _OUR_ time to work on it.
> 
> It might be worth y'all's time to work on a lightweight scriptable
> interface, so that others could work on it and other things, perhaps?
> That way I might someday get around to writing a command-line interface,
> which would be a dozen kinds of sweet.

Most of the scripting capability is already there...  UTSL.

> This on an Athlon 1500 with 2,299 BogoMIPS running gnucash 1.6.5 (I've
> not yet upgraded to 1.8 for various reasons); possibly 1.8 is a
> speed-demon, but prior experience (I've been using gnucash since '98 or
> '99) suggests not.

Well, one change made in 1.8 is that the splash screen shows up MUCH
sooner.  I just ran a test.. I've got a 1.2GHz P-III (2390 Bogomips)
and I'm currently running a compile in the background under VMware
running another instance of Linux -- so the CPU was already fully
hosed.  In this degenerate case, it did take 8 seconds for the splash
screen to appear, and then another 50 seconds until the rest of the UI
came up.  However, this is the exception, not the rule.  Normally the
splash screen is up in about 2, and the rest of the UI in about 15.

Debtates about acceptability aside, I agree that the startup
performance does require some work.  The last wave of gnucash
developers did us a disservice in their modularization efforts,
because now everything is run through the guile interpreter.  IMHO
this slows it down considerably.  But nobody has performed a profiling
analysis to work on performance.  Care to volunteer?

> > I don't know--I've never tried.  I know you could do this for the
> > business bills (indeed, this is what it currently does at session
> > startup), but I don't know if the scheme hooks exist for scheduled
> > transactions.
> 
> Are there any docs on using the Scheme interface from outside of
> gnucash?  Last time I looked I couldn't find any, but that doesn't mean

There are some, yes.  Read the email archives.  Read the gnucash
documentation and architecture documents.

"gnucash-env guile" is your friend.  Then you just need to:

        (use-modules (gnucash gnc-module))
        (gnc:module-load "gnucash/engine" 0)

And now you've got the engine loaded.

Note that all of this is with Gnucash 1.8.

> that they don't exist.  Possibly this is included in 1.8?  I've been
> looking for a reason to battle dependency hell and upgrade...

Uhh... I'm not sure what dependency hell you mean.  If you can compile
1.6, then you have all the dependencies (modulo an upgrade to g-wrap)
to compile 1.8.  Also, binaries are generally available for many OSes.
You have very little excuse for not running 1.8, IMHO.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available