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

[David T.]

Josh--

I wanted to make a point of thanking you for this passionate contribution to the discussion. You have done a great job of pointing out the great people behind this software and the efforts they have done to improve Gnucash in so many ways. And I want to take a moment to underscore that I agree with your sentiments. I am truly grateful for the developers on this project, and I understand how much a labor of love this software is. I use Gnucash and am in awe at how much it does, and how much effort has gone into it.

I also respect your point about their not being an "us" and a "them" when it comes to users and developers. And I agree that we should abandon the attitude. But along with this "all of us in it together" mindset must come an understanding that some of us can only bring our experience in using the software to the table. I have come to find that I am one of these. 

I have made attempts to fix some of the shortcomings I have seen as a user, only to run smack into my own inability to program. That was the origin of this thread, in fact--I tried to take an older existing report and modify it to work under 2.2.9.

Whenever possible now, I try to give back to the community as best I can, sharing with others my own experience using Gnucash. I will look at the documentation and see how I might contribute there.

David

--- On Wed, 8/26/09, Josh Sled <jsled at asynchronous.org> wrote:

> From: Josh Sled <jsled at asynchronous.org>
> Subject: The Experience of Users [WAS: Re: The Experience Of Reports]
> To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Date: Wednesday, August 26, 2009, 10:24 PM
> 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}
> 
> -----Inline Attachment Follows-----
> 
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