The Gnucash database?

[Mark H. Wood]

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On Sat, 24 Jul 2004, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> Nice try, but I'll argue every point...
>
> On Sat, Jul 24, 2004 at 10:33:18AM -0500, Mark H. Wood was heard to remark:
[snip]

I think I've been pursuing a fruitless line of argument.  I'm going to
have to think about some of this for a while.  In the meantime:

> > Financial *reports* are, to a machine, meaningless BLOBs.  When rendered
> > on a viewing medium they are spatial arrangements of tables and formatted
> > data from individual rows which are highly meaningful to humans, but
> > useless for re-input to computers.  But you don't store reports in an
> > accounting system; you synthesize them when asked.
>
> Bing. The person who started this thread beasically stated
>
> "I have this report, I want to import it into gnucash. Why is
> gnucash so stupid that it can't do this?"

I'm sorry I discarded the original posting.  This is, in my recollection,
the first I have heard that the input was to be a report.  I will admit to
an assumption:  I read "flat file" and thought he had files like these:

txn-id,document #,account,note,debit,credit
44,3041,asset:checking,grooming,,20.00
44,,expense:pet care,,20.00,
45,3042,asset:checking,ToneDef CD,,17.32
45,,expense:music,,16.95,
45,,expense:sales tax,,0.37,
46,card,asset:checking,gasoline,,22.12
46,,expense:auto:fuel,,22.12,

txn-id,date,description
44,20030421,Ace Pet Care
45,20030421,Worst Buy
46,20030422,Dinoco

which is a set of flat CSV files containing everything needed to express
three transactions.  Is it not?

I don't see why it is *impossible* to load CSV data into Gnucash.  It's
simply that no one has done the work to realize that possibility.  If you
want to load data *today*, you need them in QIF or OFX format.  But I
still see no obstacle to using something like the example above, so long
as someone does the work to implement it.

(I'm not asking anyone to do that work.  I don't need this myself.  I just
hate watching people arguing past each other and I think that's what has
been happening.)

> > All this is representable in tables,
>
> Gnucash has several dozen tables; I haven't counted recently.
>
> > before
> > there were DBMSs.
>
> DBMS's were invented to solve the accounting problem ... you see how far
> we've come ... There are lots of DBMS's but the accounting problem
> remains unsolved.

"The accounting problem" -- please, what problem is that?

- -- 
Mark H. Wood, radical centrist     OpenPGP ID 876A8B75     mhwood at ameritech.net
No amount of clipart will save dull writing or an uninteresting topic.
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