I'll volunteer to help...

[Bill Wohler]

Jon Lapham <lapham at extracta.com.br> writes:

> Now, that is just how I decided to do the FAQ, certainly not
> necessarily the best way.  :)  I figured that until we had a complete
> guide, this was the best approach.  But, I see what you mean, put the
> *actual* most frequently asked questions there...

Yup, those are the two major styles. I like the latter--try to put the
information in the manual, the README, or wherever it is appropriate,
and save the FAQ for the questions that actually come up. Many FAQs
*are* answered in the manual; in these cases, the answer can simply
include a URL to the manual.

What I do with the comp.mail.mh FAQ is to answer FAQs on the newsgroup
with a URL to the answer instead of cut and pasting the answer. That
way, I hope that they might read another answer and learn a bit and
maybe hit the FAQ first next time. Michael could take this
responsibility here (saving Derek that time).

>> Also, the answer to "Is there a batch mode (non-interactive) available
>> for GnuCash, for building reports, etc?" is not entirely true. How about
>> gnucash --add-price-quotes file.xac?
>
> I'm not familiar with this.  What does it do?  Looking at the wording,
> "add-price-quote", I'm guessing adds prices to stock quotes, probably
> using the Finance::Quote mechanism?  If so, then this should get
> documented in the investment chapter, section "setting stock price".
>
> http://www.jandr.org/temp/gnucashdocs/invest_stockprice1.html

Yup. The argument --add-price-quotes does the same thing as Tools ->
Price Editor -> Get Quotes. My eyes glazed over when I read "Setting
Stock Price Automatically" so I think it might be better to say
something like the following:

    The command "gnucash --add-price-quotes $HOME/gnucash.xac" can be
    used to fetch the current prices of your stocks. This can be
    automated by creating a crontab entry. For example, to update your
    file every Friday evening after the Wall Street markets close
    (modify the time accordingly for your time zone), you could add the
    following to your personal crontab:

	0 16 * * 5      gnucash --add-price-quotes $HOME/gnucash.xac > /dev/null 2>&1

I've lodged a bug report about suppressing any output with this command,
as well as suppressing gratuitous stderr output--the redirection of
stdout and stderr to /dev/null shouldn't be necessary here. The funny
thing is I just browsed my bugs at bugzilla and didn't see this, and I
see it still isn't fixed in 1.8.4.

> PS: This is great!  A discussion about documentation... woohoo.

I'm with you bud! I'm updating the MH-E manual as we speak.

-- 
Bill Wohler <wohler at newt.com>  http://www.newt.com/wohler/  GnuPG ID:610BD9AD
Maintainer of comp.mail.mh FAQ and MH-E. Vote Libertarian!
If you're passed on the right, you're in the wrong lane.