gnucash and gnome

Sat May 3 19:20:29 EDT 2008

Peter,

I'm running OS X 10.4.11 and have had no difficulty using Fink to
install and run GC. I'm currently at GC 2.2.4 and I'm just waiting for
the package maintainer to add 2.2.5 source to the repository and then
I'll upgrade. Getting everything compiled did take quite a few hours
but I'm still running a G4 machine. I'm sure things will be much
faster when I get a newer machine. My experience is that Fink, being
based on the Debian package system, handles dependencies intelligently
and rarely requires any manual intervention on my part. The Fink
Commander gui makes things even easier. You do need to keep Fink
itself properly updated.

You might consider wiping out all your Fink installed stuff and trying
again using Fink Commander.

I've never had any luck with MacPorts and just gave up on it a long time ago.

I'm holding off moving to Leopard because so many things concerning
X11 and Fink are broken or buggy; the Fink mailing lists are full of
messages from people about their problems on Leopard.

I've also grabbed source for various things, mostly command line
utilities that haven't been available through Fink, and manually
configured and compiled them. That's gone pretty well, although
sometimes I'll have to add a symbolic link because something is
installed in a different place than the program expects.

It's one of the nicest things about OS X - there's this lovely,
well-integrated Aqua interface for the average user and for a lot of
my day to day use of the computer, where things "just work" (for the
most part and certainly a whole lot better than Windows IMO), and then
there's this BSD system for the power user. There's a whole universe
of powerful and interesting Un*x source code out there that will never
be ported to any sort of GUI, much less Aqua, but which compiles and
runs just fine on OS X. For a lot of people, it's the best of both
worlds.

That said, I know that dealing with things like X11 and Fink are
pretty intimidating to the average user. You end up with something
that doesn't fit in well at all with the rest of the system. And I've
found that GC 2.2.4, although stable and functional, is not a well
behaved OS X citizen, even under X11. The help files are unavailable
and the splash screen leaks out of X11 through my other windows,
meaning I can't use anything else while GC loads. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

You need to keep in mind that this situation is largely out of the
control of the GnuCash developers, and they are dependent, as are the
rest of us, on work done elsewhere in other projects. The Win32 API
dates back to the mid-nineties; it's well understood and there's a
large body of knowledge and mature tools available to the developer.
Of most importance to GC on Windows, Tor Lillqvist's project to port
gtk+ to Windows dates back to 1997.

OTOH, OS X is a much newer beast than Win32 and has gone through some
radical changes from version to version. Apple has been willing to
break things in order to make OS X better, while Microsoft has prized
backward compatibility at the cost of some real cruft and API
ugliness.

If you really want to see gtk+ based programs like GnuCash become
proper Aquafied programs no longer needing X11, then help port gtk+
plus to OS X:

http://developer.imendio.com/projects/gtk-macosx/

When I can find the time, I'll try to build a proper OS X GnuCash app
bundle. GnuCash is quite a bit more complicated a program than the
apps that have so far been successfully built using the gtk-macosx
tools, so we'll see how it goes. I'm sure eventually everything will
fall into place.

In the meantime, if you're using OS X and really want to use GnuCash,
you seem to have three choices at this time:

1. Install X11 and use Fink to install GnuCash and all its
dependencies. That has worked well enough for my purposes.

2. Install Windows in a virtual machine under OS X and use the Windows
version of GnuCash.

3. Install one of the friendlier distributions of Linux, such as
Ubuntu, in a virtual machine under OS X and use the Linux version of
GnuCash.

Hopefully, in the not too distant future, we'll have better choices.

(Since most on this mailing list seem to be Linux users, I'll just say
that I also like and use Linux. I'm very agnostic about things like
operating systems and programming languages, and I try to stay as far
away as I can from flame wars and trolls on these subjects. I do try
to also stay away from Windows as much as possible but use it when I
have to and don't make a fuss. I hate helping friends and family
members remove malware infestations from their Windows machines and
always encourage them to consider the alternatives. For my personal
use, I have found my OS X machine to be the nicest computer I've ever
owned. As they say, undoubtedly YMMV.)

Rich

On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 9:24 AM, Peter Eldorson <drbjornberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just to wade into the debate:
> Apparently I'm one of the few answering Steve's email who operates from
> a Mac platform. I'm also in complete agreement with him.
>
> My original version of GC was 1.8 downloaded using the Fink installer. I
> tried upgrading to 2.0 through Fink, but I'm nowhere near sophisticated
> enough to manage all the stable/unstable release issues, installation
> errors and other programmer sludge that occurred so I never got the 2.0
> release operational. Instead I abandoned Fink and tried MacPorts.
> Eventually, after over 2 months of playing with editors that I didn't
> think I would ever need to learn,  and hours of downloading I got a GC
> 2.0 operational. It runs on a vestigial Gnome desktop on a Mac... is
> anyone surprised?
>
> So then I tried upgrading to GC 2.2 using MacPorts. That was last fall
> (October 2007). After going through another whole round of upgrading and
> downloading, as near as I can figure there is still a conflict between
> something called slib, guile, and half a dozen other dependencies.
> Starting GC 2.2 resulted in a system hang that has been described by
> several others on this list. No one apparently offered a solution and
> the MacPorts guys list simply said that there wasn't a maintainer. And
> one poster said I should try reloading the unstable versions from Fink
> again. So I and probably everyone else with a MacOS has given up on GC.
>
> But Surprise again... I work in a Windows environment at my office. We
> can't install or use applications that are not 'authorized' so I
> downloaded Portable apps to a Western Digital portable harddrive.  They
> all run fine from a USB port. This week I noticed that there was a GC
> version available so I installed it. Wow. No problems! No programmer
> sludge! No issues! And the program initiated without hanging the system!
> Imagine, it took a Windows environment to show the great open sourcers
> how to "get 'er dun".
>
> So like Steve, I want to use GC, and it's latest upgrade because it is
> superior, even in an older version, to Intuit. But I have a Mac I want
> to use for my personal and business finances, but I can't because the
> 'geek' crowd have no interest in my problems. And the only solution
> offered is to use the Windows environment GC.
>
> If you think about this for one second you'll see how truly ironic this
> is : t hat the only really useful version of a great Open Source program
> is written for the operating system that the Open Source community was
> fundamentally started for in the first place!
>
> Thank you Steve for pointing this out. And I too wish to send my
> congratulations to all the wonderful Gnucash volunteers!
>
> Any chance I'll see a version of GC that downloads, installs and runs
> cleanly on a MacOS in the future? What version number would that be? 4.0?
>
> Peter
>
>
> Steve Brenneis wrote:
>> Folks,
>>
>> I'm sure you've heard much of this before, but I thought I would throw in my $0.02.
>>
>> I run a small business and was looking forward to using gnucash. I use Gentoo Linux for most of my server and laptop applications. Using portage, I checked out what would be necessary to put gnucash on my laptop. That's when the fun began. I am a KDE user, so I'm sure you know what's coming. The list of packages needed to install gnucash looks like this:
>>
>> gnome-base/libglade-2.6.2
>> gnome-base/orbit-2.14.12
>> x11-themes/gnome-icon-theme-2.20.0
>> gnome-base/gnome-keyring-2.20.3
>> gnome-base/gail-1.20.2
>> gnome-base/libgnomeprint-2.18.4
>> app-text/rarian-0.6.0-r1
>> gnome-base/gnome-common-2.20.0
>> net-misc/neon-0.26.4
>> app-text/iso-codes-1.5
>> x11-libs/libwnck-2.20.3
>> dev-scheme/guile-1.8.3-r2
>> net-libs/libsoup-2.2.104
>> dev-scheme/slib-3.1.5-r1
>> gnome-extra/libgsf-1.14.7
>> app-text/docbook-xml-dtd-4.1.2-r6
>> app-text/gnome-doc-utils-0.12.1
>> net-libs/xulrunner-1.8.1.13
>> gnome-base/gconf-2.20.1-r1
>> gnome-base/libgnomecanvas-2.20.1.1
>> gnome-base/libbonobo-2.20.4
>> app-text/scrollkeeper-9999
>> x11-libs/libsexy-0.1.11
>> x11-libs/goffice-0.6.1
>> x11-misc/notification-daemon-0.3.7
>> gnome-base/libgnomeprintui-2.18.2
>> x11-libs/libnotify-0.4.4
>> gnome-base/gnome-vfs-2.20.1-r1
>> gnome-base/libgnome-2.20.1.1
>> gnome-base/libbonoboui-2.20.0
>> gnome-base/libgnomeui-2.20.1.1
>> gnome-base/gnome-mount-0.6
>> gnome-extra/gtkhtml-3.16.3
>> gnome-extra/yelp-2.20.0
>> app-doc/gnucash-docs-2.2.0
>> app-office/gnucash-2.2.3
>>
>> And that's without the HBCI or OFX extensions.
>>
>> I read the FAQ on why gnucash depends on gnome and two things struck me.
>>
>> It is stated that plenty of KDE users use gnucash just fine. Well I guess that's true, except that they have to install gnome first. And this isn't just a little bit of gnome. The package list to install and use gnome as my desktop isn't much longer.
>>
>> It is also stated that the gnucash developers' time is better spent developing gnucash than in developing print libraries, graphing libraries, and HTML renderers. All true and an admirable goal. As a 35 year IT professional, I couldn't agree more. However, what the developers have done, by selecting a particular desktop environment, is offloaded the responsibility for these things to their end users. In doing so, gnucash has contributed to the "geek factor" of Linux and has thrown more flammables on the desktop holy wars. I'm sure that was not the desire of the gnucash team.
>>
>> Since I try never to complain without providing a constructive suggestion, I would offer that what the gnucash team should do is to identify those functions that directly depend on gnome and create an abstraction layer from those requirements. Then the end user can feel free to use whichever desktop they have selected without having to install 75% of the one they didn't select. That leaves gnucash out of the desktop debate and opens its use up to whole groups of new users, like me, who won't be able to use it because they don't want to have to install gnome on their KDE system.
>>
>> I'm going to check back from time to time to see if the dependency on gnome has been eliminated or reduced to an acceptable point. I would love to use gnucash and contribute to its success story. Until then, I guess it's Microsoft and Intuit for the time being. Bleh!
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Steve Brenneis
>> Managing Partner
>> Atlantic Coast Online Productions, LLC
>>
>>
>> ---------------------------------
>> Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile.  Try it now.
>> _______________________________________________
>> gnucash-user mailing list
>> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
>> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
>> -----
>> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
>> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>