[GNC] read-only accounts

[Mattia Rizzolo]

On Fri, Dec 03, 2021 at 06:52:57PM -0500, D. via gnucash-user wrote:
> Placeholder account registers are displayed as greyed out. While it's
> not necessarily obvious upon first viewing, it becomes clearer when
> you try to add a transaction (and it prevents you).

Indeed, I agree there are plenty of details that are telling you to not
touch those splits (the number and effectivness of which depends from
where you are actually trying to touch them).  But well, it feels like
all of them are subpar.

> I do agree with the OP that the way gnucash handles transactions in
> placeholder accounts is very confusing. I've raised this point in the
> past
> (https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2017-February/040345.html).
> 
> Clearly, it's a complicated issue.

I have a feeling that this "placeholder" flag ought to be split.

It might just the way I'm using gnucash, but the way I started using
placeholder accounts is basically to use them only as an internal nodes
(<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(data_structure)>), which do not
contain any data (transactions in this case) (incidentally, I also do
not have any internal node that is not a placeholder account).

I think that ought to be the real "placeholder", whereas a separate
"read-only" flag coule be useful to set for all the other cases where
you want to freeze the account from any possible future change
whatsoever.

However I realize such change is likely to be:
 1) not trivial to implement
 2) not easy at all to deploy to already existing books (because neither
    the "new placeholder" I described above nor the "read-only" flags
    match the current behaviour)
 3) possibly controversial due to the plenty of ways one might be
    managing their books


So I guess for now the way is to set them to placeholder and pay
attention to the edits one does :D

-- 
regards,
                        Mattia Rizzolo

GPG Key: 66AE 2B4A FCCF 3F52 DA18  4D18 4B04 3FCD B944 4540      .''`.
More about me:  https://mapreri.org                             : :'  :
Launchpad user: https://launchpad.net/~mapreri                  `. `'`
Debian QA page: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=mattia  `-
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/attachments/20211204/4b3a271d/attachment.sig>