What's your favorite year end method?

[Derek Atkins]

I think both Josh and I agree that the report subsystem
needs an overhaul.  Neither of us are whetted to Scheme,
and I'm sure that Josh would be quite happy to replace
Scheme with some other "language".   I think Josh would
also prefer to see a system where the report has two
part, the "calculation" part and the display part.

As a side project, it would be great to swap out GtkHTML
for something else, perhaps GtkMozEmbed?

Would you be interested in working on this in the context
of GnuCash?

-derek

"Donald Allen" <donaldcallen at gmail.com> writes:

> I think it is pretty clear that the current reports implementation is
> a problem. I don't want to mis-represent what Derek and Josh have
> said, but I have the clear impression from reading email from each of
> them that they are unhappy with the current implementation (and how
> it's implemented).
>
> For me, the reports are the weakest part of gnucash, which I've been
> using otherwise very happily for over two years now. I find many of
> the reports inadequate not only from a performance standpoint (and,
> yes, I've experienced the 5-10 minutes grinding away (Asset Barchart),
> which in my case resulted in just a legend -- no data) but from a
> content and presentation standpoint as well.
>
> In an ideal world, gnucash would be as brilliant at making information
> of all that data that  it lets us accumulate so naturally, and in
> practice I think it fails in that regard (and, yes, I fully understand
> that this is a labor of love and that the developers have day jobs;
> I'm not being critical of anyone; I'm simply calling a spade a spade,
> at least as I see it). This is why I'm working on the Python program I
> mentioned in an email to this thread last night. I'm already getting
> income statement, balance sheet, net worth, and unrealized gains (with
> dividends) reports from it, sorted and presented the way I want them.
> Where they should, items it reports agree with gnucash to the penny.
> And it generates these reports in less than 30 seconds on a TP T60 (2
> Ghz Core 2 Duo). This was an act of desperation on my part, because I
> couldn't get gnucash to answer many key questions I had about my own
> finances, and a look at the reporting code led me to conclude that
> making an investment in improving what's there was not likely to be
> feasible or effective, given my time constraints and my worries about
> the performance of guile/scheme (and I'm an experienced Scheme
> programmer -- Jerry Sussman and Chris Hanson are old friends and I
> used MIT Scheme as the basis for Butterfly Lisp when I ran that
> project at BBN 20 years ago; I don't know Guy Steele as well as Jerry
> and Chris, but did work with him at Thinking Machines in the early
> 90s). So it was either this, or abandon gnucash, which I would have
> hated to do.
>
> /Don
>
> On Dec 17, 2007 11:47 AM, Andrew Sackville-West <ajswest at mindspring.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, Dec 16, 2007 at 05:29:17PM -0700, Ron Morse wrote:
>> > I would offer that the Gnucash data file is really pretty compact (three
>> > years worth of stuff for me is still under 300Kb) so I don't feel a
>> > pressing need to split the file.  I do make a copy as I close out each
>> > year, but that's a simple matter of file > save as when I get to the
>> > point that I have reconciled all the accounts that are going to get
>> > reconciled.
>>
>> the size of the data set begins to become an issue in the reports
>> before anywhere else. My largest file is currently 1.5MB compressed, and
>> while all the register functions, find, sorting, etc work just fine,
>> the reports are beginning to become a problem. Some of them are not
>> very efficient (especially Income Statement pre 2.2.2) with a single
>> run of the report taking a couplem inutes or more (not a very fast
>> machine here, but still...). Other reports aren't so bad, but it does
>> get to be a drag.
>>
>> So that's the issue I see with large data sets.
>>
>> A
>>
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-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available