GnuCash: Docs: Where to document?

[John Ralls]

> On Dec 11, 2017, at 4:41 PM, Charles Sliger <chaz at bctonline.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mon, 2017-12-11 at 16:01 -0800, John Ralls wrote:
>> 
>>> On Dec 11, 2017, at 2:27 PM, Charles Sliger <chaz at bctonline.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I'm starting to migrate from QuickBooks to GnuCash.
>>> I'm working my way through the integration issues with
>>> Gnucash - Python - Postgresql
>>> How would the GnuCash team prefer that I document this for the benefit
>>> of others?
>>> 
>>> I've got about 30 years of unix/database/network systems engineering
>>> under my belt and without that to draw on I don't think I would be able
>>> to work my way through this as the documentation seems rather sparse and
>>> fractured.
>>> 
>>> I'll have to document it for my own purposes anyway so let me know if
>>> there's interest.
>>> 
>> Chaz,
>> 
>> Can you outline what you propose to document? Integration with QuickBooks doesn’t really make sense to me and SQL servers have plenty of documentation themselves as well as hundreds of books and websites teaching how to administer them. Repeating any of that in our documentation would be pointless.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
>> 
>> 
> John,
> What I will be documenting is the actual nuts and bolts process for
> using GnuCash, Python, and Postgresql together.  Integration is probably
> too strong a word right now but I see these three as being very
> complementary.  While it might be true that all of the information is
> out there somewhere, I have had to make a number of educated guesses in
> the process of just getting GnuCash and Postgresql working together.
> This was after purchasing and reading all three books on GnuCash and
> spending a good deal of time with on-line research.  Most people are not
> going to have the time to become dba's in order to reap the benefits of
> an RDBMS such as Postgresql.  I find they can benefit from having the
> documentation for something like this pulled together in a single
> narrative.  Given that the average PC today can easily handle running a
> combination like this, it seems natural to leverage the capabilities of
> a database like Postgresql.
> Soooo...  I just thought I'd ask if there was a place put this kind of
> information and a process for getting it there.

It seems to me that your personal blog might be a good place to document the “process”. I think that anything involving coding is not of major interest to 99 and 44/100% of our user base. That’s not to say that you can’t write useful articles about it for the wiki, but the wiki’s general style is more descriptive than narrative. 

As for most people not having the time to learn to be DBAs, I agree. What I disagree about is that they should set up a DB server anyway. With your 30 years of experience you might think that maintaining a DB server and ensuring that it’s secure and that the data is properly backed up is trivial, but for nearly all users that’s far from being the case. If it’s possible to write “How to be a competent DBA in 30 minutes” then there are a dozen books and 100+ websites out there already. I haven’t found them and I don’t think it’s possible, but if I’m wrong then far better to put some pointers in the wiki than to create the 137th version.

It is possible, even simple, to enjoy the benefits of SQL without messing around with being a server DBA. SQLite3 creates a very usable SQL database in a single file that can be easily copied for backup, no administration required--in fact, nothing much to administer.

One more point: You perhaps misunderstand how GnuCash uses the database backends. It is not (yet, nor will it be in 2.8) a database application. It uses the database as a data store, reading the whole thing into memory at the beginning of the session. After that the only queries are updates and inserts.

To answer your final question, the place in the GnuCash infrastructure to put it would be the wiki, https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki <https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki>. Thanks to spammers we have had to insert human approval into the account creation process. Just say something about what you want to write so that we know that you’re not a spam-bot or someone who thinks they need a wiki account to use the program and your request will be quickly approved. After that there’s a one-week waiting period for your account to be blessed for editing. There might be an issue about creating pages after that; if you have a problem best to bring it up on IRC (https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/IRC <https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/IRC>).

Regards,
John Ralls