Custom Reports

[Yawar Amin]

Hi Derek,

On 2012-04-24, at 12:38, Derek Atkins wrote:

>> […]
> 
> If a report is that useful to so many people why wouldn't we want to
> just include it in the next release of GnuCash?  Why require people to
> find the report and install it themselves?

Because once a report is distributed with GnuCash, it then falls to the GnuCash team to ensure that report always works as originally intended. Even if the team doesn’t particularly feel responsible for the report, the public perception is that the report comes bundled with GnuCash and so if it’s not working as it should the GnuCash team should be responsible for fixing it.

OTOH, if it comes as a downloadable extra, there’s no such (perceived or not) obligation.

A lot of software packages have taken the ‘extras’ approach, I could enumerate them but I’m sure you can think of many.

> As for a simple "how does a report work", I recommend you look at the
> hello world report.

I didn’t mean ‘How do GnuCash Scheme reports in general work?’, I meant ‘What is the intended purpose of this specific report which I can run in GnuCash, what benefit does it offer me and what other information do I need to know about it?’, in other words the kind of info that’s not really conveyed by a name in a menu entry.

Regards,

Yawar