FreeCoins and gnuCash revisited

David J Patrick davidjpatrick at sympatico.ca
Thu Sep 2 19:06:43 EDT 2004


On Thu, 2004-09-02 at 18:42, Neil Williams wrote:

> I have yet to hear a reply or see any activity on the 
> SourceForge news pages, mailing list or CVS commits.
It's been reeel slow, but I have had discourse with the developer.

> 
> I also can't get the freecoins code to produce documentation with recent 
> versions of xmlto.
I thought it was documented with doxygen, or something.

> 
> I may yet abandon freecoins and do it all via pilot-link and a C program 
> running on the host machine, not the PDA. That program would be a fairly 
> simple enhancement of an existing qof_book_merge example. However, I won't 
> have time to develop it any time soon.

IMHO integrating invoice functionality into FreeCoins would be great,
but any solid invoicing enhancements would be welcome.

>  So far, 
> there is little sign of activity.

try the developers email, not the SF forum.
> 
> (Isn't is freecoinsExport, not FreecoinsToXML?)

both exist. The former exports to QIF, the latter to XML for GnuCash.

> I was kind of 
> hoping that your enquiry indicated an existing knowledge of the freecoins 
> code or future development direction or recent activity levels.

It has kind of bogged down recently.
> 
> If you have some code experience, get involved with the pilot-link programs 

not code capable, sorry, still learning bash.

> and perhaps get a bash script that can retrieve the data using existing 
> pilot-link programs. That would at least help develop a C program that would 
> use the code for those programs to create a single conduit to retrieve all 
> the necessary data in one sync operation, not three. Just some procedural 
> stuff would be useful: Which fields in which database are essential to all 
> invoices? Which fields are optional? Which might be ignored completely?
> 
> I need:
> 1. A particular custom field that is used as the BillingID in GnuCash
> 2. The start and end time from Calendar
> 3. The company and job name from Contacts
> 4. All expenses recorded for that day in Expenses (amount, type, company, 
> city)
> 5. Options to retrieve specific dates
> 6. Notes for particular companies - either via standardised memo formats or 
> custom fields in Contacts or notes in contacts (note: using Contacts for this 
> would result in massive duplication when one company has lots of jobs.) Notes 
> would include rates, discounts, unpaid absence (lunch) etc.
> 
> That last one is the weakest. It may be better to have a separate file or 
> database of some kind that stores the stuff that is specific to a company, 
> not a job. There are also problems with getting the same company name/details 
> in the Palm and in GnuCash. A C program on the host machine would be able to 
> store the GnuCash GUID for that customer and job more easily than a Palm 
> database - at least, that's how I'd see it.

> > That sounds like Christmas ! .. can I open it before Christmas ?
> 
> No. I'm leaning more and more to using the host machine instead of the PDA for 
> one simple reason: PalmOS isn't a fixed target and the devices keep changing. 

in my (limited) experience, if one were to target palm OS >3.5 it's all
backward compatable.

> Developing for a stable environment, like GNU/Linux, is a far more 
> straightforward project and therefore more likely to succeed and continue. 
> The apparent lack of activity in freecoins is increasing this tendency.

I was hoping that your input might revive this excellent programs
development.
> 
> I'm afraid that I wouldn't use freecoins as it stands for personal accounting 
> - it doesn't suit my needs. All I need is the invoice functionality - if it 
> was added to freecoins, I'd use that. Otherwise, I'll work with pilot-link to 
> create the functionality on the host machine.

understood. good luck !
djp



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