Archiving old transations

[Jonathan Kamens]

OK, so once again my GnuCash data file is so large that I have to sit 
around twiddling my thumbs waiting for GnuCash to start up every time I 
need to do any bookkeeping.

This prompted me to do what I do every time this becomes a large enough 
problem for me to notice it, which is to search yet again to see if the 
folks who maintain GnuCash have gotten around to actually doing 
something about this problem.

This prompted me to find this chestnut posted by Colin Law to the 
mailing list last April:

    Usually this is not an issue as over the years the power of your PC
    will increase much quicker than the size of the file.

    For example in the years that I have been using gnucash the file has
    grown to a couple of Megabytes whilst my hard disk has grown from
    10GB to 400GB and my PC has quadrupled in speed.

*snort*

Dude, my GnuCash file is *more than 21 megabytes*. It would be even 
larger than that if I hadn't already archived most transactions from 
2004-2006 **using the script I've posted here previously 
<http://stuff.mit.edu/%7Ejik/software/close-books.pl.txt>.

I'll be the first to admit that my script sucks. It's slow as molasses 
(especially when you run it over a 21MB GnuCash file!), it doesn't 
handle all sorts of edge cases, etc. The best I can say for it is that 
it's good enough for my purposes if I'm patient enough to let it finish. 
But really, I shouldn't have to maintain and use this sucky script, 
because given that this is an ability that users of GnuCash have been 
asking for Like Forever, someone should get around to actually doing 
something about it.

Stop telling your users that you know better than they do and they don't 
actually need the feature they say they need. That's rude and 
patronizing. Just solve the problem, for pete's sake.

Sincerely,

A disgruntled long-time GnuCash user