The Gnucash database?

Linas Vepstas linas at linas.org
Wed Jul 21 20:37:57 EDT 2004


On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 07:08:01PM -0500, blfs was heard to remark:
> > How about understanding gnucash, then?
> > Use the source, Luke!

Someone's being rude; there's no need for that.

> > There may no longer be any direct import tools but if you dig around you
> > may find some stuff to do intermediate conversions. You may even be able
> > to feed stuff through quicken to get the qif files to import.
> >
> > Perhaps you'll even find the old tools that do what you want. Perhaps
> > even older versions of gnucash would be useful.
> >
> > Look around. Do some searches. Try freshmeat, sourceforge, rpmfind,
> > tucows and the linux archive sites like tsx-11, etc.

Whomever finds these, please be sure to update the gnucash wiki with
this info.

http://gnomesupport.org/wiki/index.php/GnuCash

> I have gone into the mail archives and apparently the decision has been made
> to move GNUcash to SQL.

SQL is nicer for a number fo reasoons.

> It seems pretty obvious to me anyway that the best solution would be to make
> gnucash dependent
> and separate from a database software program.

There will be multiple databse backends

> Now in the windows world there are two kinds of
> programs that resemble Gnucash.  There are programs
> like Quicken and Peachtree, which are canned programs
> and offer little flexibility.  I repeat that I am ignorant
> about Gnucash, but it seems to me that this resembles
> the design of gnucash.

Yes, that is correct, although I would like to add more 
flexibility, and am moving in that general direction.
Slowly :(

> There is also another class of small business accounting
> software that is built on top of Access.  These are far
> superior in my opinion as they offer the user much more
> flexibility.

Yes, this is what the GnuE folks have been saying. 
And there is a lot to be said for that approach; its
just not how gnucash grew up (its 7 or 8 years old now).

Linux still doesn't have an ms-access like thing, except 
for rekall; I am planning on creating an ms-access-liek
thing real soon now (dwi.sourceforge.net)

> Can someone please explain to me the design of the
> gnucash software program or point me to documentation
> describing it?

www.gnucash.org please crawl through the menus on the left hand side.

> One thing that I don't understand.  I keep reading that
> this and that is not done because this is all relying on a
> volunteer effort.  But this is a serious software area.
> If serious people were using this program this would
> not be an issue.

Most programmers don't do accounting; most people who
use gnucash aren't programmers.  This is makes gnucash
very very different than, say, Apache, GCC, Linux, 
Jakarta/Struts, etc.  

The gnucash volunteer community is comparable to abiword
or gnumeric, both projects which are also hurting for developers.

> I know that this program is sooner or later going to
> become very important.  I am a little concerned that
> in none of the responses to my original post no one has
> clearly explained the design of this program.

I haven't read the thread yet.  DO you have specific
questions beyond, say

http://gnucash.org/en/architecture.phtml

or maybe 

http://cvs.gnucash.org/docs/HEAD/modules.html

?

--linas



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