The Experience of Users [WAS: Re: The Experience Of Reports]

[Josh Sled]

Daniel Trezub <daniel3ub at gmail.com> writes:
> free software is made by programmers for
> programmers.

> the programmers 

> the programmers

> we, common End Users

> the programmers

> if I was a programmer

> you guys

(I don't mean to pick on you, Daniel, at all.  :) This email is more a
reaction (in frustration) to the general sense of end-user frustration
I've seen on this mailing list … over many years, even.  It's not so
much angry as conciliatory.)

GnuCash has basically been substantially improved by one (badass) person
(Phil Longstaff) in the last year, who has mostly been doing (really
great!) work specifically on the DB backend and report HTML rendering
sub-sub-system.  This is after a pretty long development drought after
2.2.  There are some others (Christian Stimming and Andreas Köhler in
particular, also Charles Day, and a handful of good patch-contributors)
who are doing great work, too, but are not active champions or lead
developers in the same way.

But this them ("the programmers") vs. us ("the end users") mentality is
simply … wrong.

You imagine a cabal of programmers actively ignoring your requests.
You seek to ascribe maliciousness where none exists.

The reality is a handful of sympathetic (ex-)devs agreeing, but lacking
the time to implement what you request … taking 8000-fold as much time
as your "common End User" request takes to write up in an email. :/

We know.  Everyone who has worked on gnucash knows the report system
sucks.  No want *wants* to say: "'just' learn scheme and learn the
gnucash object model and you can clumsily load reports and run time
using an outdated, inferior HTML rendering engine (without CSS)."  But,
that is the best answer that can be given when the question does come
up.  Overhauling the report subsystem (still, even with the much-needed
and -welcome conversion from gtkhtml to webkit) needs a serious
contribution of effort, and no one has stepped up to deliver that, yet.

It's not just reports, or even the code.  No one has stepped up to
really work on the docs in nearly a *decade*; that's a perfect "end
user" task.  The website is a mess, yet no one has submitted an
alternative.  Most projects have more work than can go around, but I
think GnuCash has an order of magnitude more than that. :(


> many of you work for free

All developers on GnuCash work for free. There is no independent
corporate sponsorship, either monetarily for the project or via
"donated" programmer cycles from a Novell or RedHat (except via
packaging, and even that seems to have dried up).

-- 
...jsled
http://asynchronous.org/ - a=jsled; b=asynchronous.org; echo ${a}@${b}
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