Giving up on Gnucash

[Neil Williams]

On Saturday 23 April 2005 1:00 pm, you wrote:

to me instead of to the list - please watch the To: field!

> Thanks Neil. Agree completely. I look forward to the G2 port. Is it
> going to be easier to install?

Depends on your distribution. Debian will be the easiest!
RFDFC!

> That's my biggest beef with gnucash at 
> present. If you don't start with a distro where it is included, getting
> all the dependencies to install and work properly is tremendously time
> consuming and difficult.

There are lists out there.

> Witness all the install questions that hit 
> this forum.

What? Where? When? 

> I run gnucash on mac

Ah, now I know what you're on about. Yes, there have been a lot of posts about 
Mac, X11 and Fink. Despite a very good FAQ that is linked from the gnucash 
home page.

Fink deals with the dependencies anyway - unless you want to build from the 
source downloaded direct from GnuCash which hasn't been customised for OSX. 

So your original question doesn't stand. GnuCash is included in OSX because 
OSX includes the option of using Fink which includes GnuCash in it's main 
package archive. True, it is an immense download from a base OSX system to 
install X11, Fink and then GnuCash. That won't change. What you should notice 
is that upgrading an existing installation is far simpler. Optional packages 
are still deemed to be included in the distro, GnuCash is optional in all 
distributions AFAIK. It's hardly as essential as bash or perl.

Fink inherits a lot from Debian and apt, it has a rolling archive that keeps 
the latest packages without needing a code freeze to move everything to a new 
distribution version in one go ala RH, Mdk and SuSE. Fink stable is actually 
more recent than Debian stable (which only has GnuCash 1.6) and is fairly 
close to Debian testing. That in turn is probably because Debian stable has a 
reputation for use on web/email servers which aren't likely to use GnuCash a 
whole lot, so testing becomes the stable desktop.

> iron and it took most of two days to  
> get it up and running. My sense is alot of folks new too but interested
> in linux give up because of install difficulties.

Now, be fair. Mac OSX isn't linux. It's GNU software but it's not a linux 
kernel. The people behind Fink do a lot of work to get GNU software to run on 
OSX and it isn't easy.

I also run GnuCash on OSX - I run Gimp, Gedit, Bluefish, Anjuta and a few 
others too. (And before you say it, I was only an interested user at the time 
- I knew v.little about the code when I got GnuCash via Fink for the first 
time.)

Rest assured that fink will take on GnuCash G2 in due course. It may well be 
delayed whilst they get used to the build but it should be available fairly 
soon after the main release in the CVS version of Fink. It will then move 
into the main fink archive a bit later. 

Having said that, once it is available, it will install as an update of the 
existing GnuCash 1.8 as easily as you can currently do
sudo fink selfupdate
sudo fink update-all

There may be a lot in G2 that's new but Fink should be able to deal with it 
without too many problems.

-- 

Neil Williams
=============
http://www.dcglug.org.uk/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/

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