Invoice API

[Derek Atkins]

Don Quixote de la Mancha <quixote at dulcineatech.com> writes:

> Funny thing though, a while back I asked about whether one could keep
> one's GnuCash XML in Subversion, so that it would be possible to roll
> back to any previous state of the file, as well as provide an audit
> trail.  And someone on this very list replied that they do just that,
> and that it works just fine.

Keeping your datafile in Subversion has nothing to do with directory
modifying the data file!  Subversion is just another way to keep
multiple backups of the data file.  HOWEVER, if you have multiple people
using it at the same time then if you ever perform merges you're
probably going to have major issues.  But just using SVN for
backup/tagging purposes is perfectly reasonable.

> My other reason for wanting to do that was to allow my business
> partners to quickly and easily look at our books.  In principle they
> all could edit the file then check it in to Subversion, but if there
> was ever a commit conflict, of course all Hell would break loose.  My
> objective was to enable read-only access for the others, and not at
> all multi-user access.  I'd be the only one writing into the file.

Sure, if you only ever have a single commiter to SVN you can certainly
use it for read-only tagged access.

> There are Python bindings for GnuCash:
>
>    http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Python_Bindings
>
> Perhaps someone could provide a Python binding that addressed the
> invoice creation API.  If someone could supply just the needed shared
> library to call from Python into the C API, it would become
> straightforward to write a Python script to do the job.
>
> I know Python pretty well, and could do that myself.  But I've tried
> to build GnuCash from source several times.  I've been a coder for
> twenty-two years, so long that there is no longer any kind of code
> that frightens me - with the exception of GnuCash.

What OS/Distro do you use?  Building GnuCash is pretty darn easy nowadays!

> Not that it's poorly written, not by any means.  It's just that there
> are so very many dependencies; a single broken dependency is enough to
> break the entire build.

That's true of any large piece of software.  Have you ever tried to
build Firefox or Open Office?

> Don Quixote

-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