Gnucash/AqBanking Packaging

[John Ralls]

On Sep 19, 2012, at 7:10 PM, "David T." <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> John--
>  
> Thanks for the reply. Sorry for mixing the two pieces up.
>  
> Given the apparently moribund nature of F::Q (last updated in 2009 on SourceForge, and variants available via mailing list only), I wonder whether another approach for gathering quotes might be found that would require fewer additional resources. 
>  
> I know you have expressed concern about the overall size of the Gnucash download, and I tend to agree.
>  
> However, I wonder whether Python could be used for this? There are HTML scraping functions in Python which might serve as starting points for a Python-based F::Q. Figuring into this is the fact that there are optional Python bindings that folks have wanted integrated into the default Gnucash compile. Adding Python by default would increase the download overall, but perhaps if integrated quote retrieval were part of the deal, it would be enough benefit?

If carefully written in pure python so that it's compatible with 2.5 - 2.7, it wouldn't necessarily require adding python to the OSX bundle. Windows, of course, doesn't include Python, so we'd still have a download/package bloat issue.

How about JavaScript? We're already bundling Webkit-Gtk, and that includes a JavaScript interpreter and all of the web paraphernalia. It shouldn't be too hard to write a C routine to exec a JavaScript program and retrieve the result.

Regards,
John Ralls