Archiving old transations

[Jonathan Kamens]

On 06/20/2013 07:14 PM, David T. wrote:
> As Open Source software, Gnucash is built, maintained, documented and 
> supported by volunteers (like Colin Law, whom you skewer in your 
> rant). The development team volunteer their time, their expertise, AND 
> their code (hint hint) to benefit all users of GnuCash.
I have been maintaining free software for >20 years. I have a 
Thunderbird add-on with >30,000 users, and another with >10,000 users.

I have submitted patches to GnuCash in the past.

I am not someone with no understanding of how free software works, nor 
am I someone who does nothing but complain without contributing anything 
to the free software community in general or to the specific projects 
about which I provide feedback.

However, even if I were such a person, that would not disqualify me from 
criticizing the maintainers of GnuCash or any other project if I felt 
that they were failing to meet the needs of their users over a long 
period of time. Just because the software is free does not render its 
maintainers immune from criticism.

I am worked up about this issue for five reasons:

 1. It is an obvious, basic piece of functionality.
 2. In fact, it is so obvious that the GnuCash maintainers have
    themselves said, in response to requests for it, that a solution was
    in the works. They said this numerous times spanning numerous years.
    No solution has emerged.
 3. It has been asked for many times by many people over the years.
 4. This has resulted in at least three different people developing
    independent solutions to the same problem, which is rather
    inefficient and counterproductive. None of these were integrated
    directly into GnuCash because, frankly, the GnuCash code base is so
    huge and convoluted that people find it difficult to work with it.
    The learning curve before productive work can be done within its
    source tree is quite steep.
 5. It is rude and patronizing for the maintainers of a piece of
    software to tell it's users, "You don't need that, even though you
    think you do," as Colin did (and others have done in past, at least
    the ones who weren't instead apparently falsely claiming that a fix
    was in the works).

> Since you've already written a script to perform the archiving 
> function (sucky though it might be), why didn't you submit it to the 
> GnuCash project years ago, so that other developers might have built 
> upon and perhaps improved upon it--and then incorporated it into the 
> project?
I did. Over eight years ago. 
http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2005-January/012817.html

   Jonathan Kamens