Any Interest in Configurable Imbalance name

[Donald Allen]

On Jan 4, 2008 9:25 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
> "Donald Allen" <donaldcallen at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > But this is something that users have and will have strong opinions
> > about, so discussing whether to do it at all, as well as UI approach
> > if you decide to go ahead,  is appropriate here, I think. *How* to do
> > it (implementation discussion) is certainly best moved to
> > gnucash-devel. You might draw the line somewhere else, but that's how
> > I see it.
>
> Not really.  Users don't really have strong opinions about it, except
> that from 1.8 -> 2.0 most people didn't like the change to automatically
> create the Imbalance accounts.  So, I think most users want to go
> back to that.
>
> > I absolutely agree that users should have at least the option of
> > asking Gnucash (via a Preference item) to prevent them from entering
> > an imbalanced transaction (or choose the current behavior). I believe
> > 1.8.x prevented the user from entering an imbalanced transaction, and
> > for me, the 2.x.y versions are a step backward in this regard.
>
> Options, in general, are bad.  It means multiple code paths and
> more testing to do.  So I think there should be an option between
> 1.8 and 2.0 mode (with 1.8 being the default), but I don't think
> that the name of the account should be something you can choose.

Yep, that's what I was saying above, except that I didn't express my
preference for the 1.8 behavior quite as strongly as you did, by
advocating that it be the default (but I do agree with you about the
default). I also agree with your comment about choosing the account
name -- it accomplishes little, other than to add clutter to the
user-interface (general comment: one of the many weaknesses of both
Quicken and MS Money, is the effect of creeping featurism on
usability; Quicken was once a simple program, with careful attention
paid to workflow in the UI, long gone now; simplicity and directness
is one of Gnucash's great strengths (compromised by the imbalanced
transactions issue we are discussing), and this should be strongly
safe-guarded against the temptation to add a little of this and a
little of that). I think the underlying behavior is the real  issue
and that's what needs to be addressed.

/Don

>
>
> >> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> >> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>
> -derek
>
> --
>        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
>