Gnucash/AqBanking Packaging

[John Ralls]

On Sep 19, 2012, at 4:01 PM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I am wondering what it would take to get AqBanking bundled with Gnucash such that new users would be able to download "an application," configure their personal financial information, and be able to retrieve online quotes.
> 
> Currently, users must download and install additional software packages (ActivePerl for Windows, XCode for Mac), and invoke a series of arcane commands in order to get online quote retrieval enabled. In the case of the Mac user, the extra download is 1.56GB, which is a hefty hefty download at the highest connection speeds; for users with mere DSL, the download can take days.  I believe all this additional overhead gives new users a negative early experience of Gnucash, and I got to wondering whether there might be some way to get online quote retrieval more integrated into the Gnucash package.
> 
> I recognize that AqBanking provides a powerful and flexible retrieval tool for Gnucash that allows a diverse array of information stores to be queried. I also recognize that the needs and capabilities of users and systems around the world vary, and Gnucash manages these diverse needs admirably well. 
> 
> Nevertheless, I believe it would be highly beneficial to end users if online quote retrieval were available once Gnucash proper were installed. Hence, my message.


You're confusing AqBanking and Price Quotes. The former *is* bundled on Windows and Mac, and no downloads are required.
Online price quotes, on the other hand, uses a separate perl module, Finance::Quote. 

We cannot redistribute ActivePerl. Their license forbids it. That rules out bundling on Win32, because the alternative is MinGW perl, and it reportedly doesn't play well with CPAN.

In theory it should be possible to include the necessary perl modules in the OSX bundle, but I've not spent enough time to get it to work, and it's not that high a priority for me. If you can get a reasonable, automatic, way to get it into the bundle, I'll gladly add it to my build process.

Regards,
John Ralls