Custom Reports

[Yawar Amin]

Hi Derek,

On 2012-04-23, at 12:24, Derek Atkins wrote:

>> […]
> 
> Historically we've just added reports to the GnuCash sources.  We're
> still happy to do that.  The main issue is that there's really no way to
> regression test, so reports don't get wide amounts of testing, and
> generally people write reports to the stable release, not the
> development code.
> 
> But seriously, if there are reports that don't exist and are generally
> useful then they should get included, not be something that people have
> to find.

Could it be more useful in the long run to have core reports included with GnuCash, and extras available through the website/wiki? Especially as more and more people might want to contribute reports (optimistically :-), and the GnuCash menu interface isn’t really well-adapted to presenting reports to users and giving them a good idea of what the reports are supposed to do. A wiki page of reports (with the actual Scheme sources on GitHub or something similar) would be able to overcome that. In fact I think that’s what the OP is trying to do as well, so there’s a bit of confluence.

Another reason for core/extras would be that we could say that the core reports are well-testing and -maintained, but the extras are a little use-if-you-know-what-you’re-doing. We’ve had a huge discussion where we’ve talked about the fact that reports might be getting crufty and a bit buggy, and there’s no clear responsibility for who should fix a report. Well, distributing a report with GnuCash seems to imply that the GnuCash team is fully responsible for fixing and maintaining it. But making it available as an extra puts the responsibility more on the report author’s side. So I tend to lean toward the latter.

Regards,

Yawar