[GNC] balance of interests between users and developers

[Geert Janssens]

I really shouldn't answer this, but it's too painful to read...

Perhaps the user's expectations are too high for a volunteer project such as gnucash. It's 
true, things go wrong. Especially with major releases which typically have changes 
accumulating over the longer development cycle which gets very little end user testing. we 
do encourage this by the way but we get surprisingly little of it. I suppose end users are 
volunteers as well and have limited time to help out in testing.

That aside, we do take these issues seriously. From what I can tell almost **all** the 
changes that went into gnucash 5.1 were to solve problems that appeared in the 5.0 release. 
There were more than we could handle in the single month between these two releases. 
We're still working on fixing more for the next release.

Those include the issue with entering descriptions in the register and the broken multi-
column reports.Please do understand that while it's sometimes easy to point out a problem, 
it does take time for a proper fix.

Yesterday we added a fix for the multi column report which we hope should solve the issue. 
You are most welcome to download the latest nightly builds to help us verify this.

The other one has a patch waiting, which is still under discussion. It has high priority but we 
don't want to make it a half-baked solution.

More hands helping out are always welcome by the way. In the absence of more helping 
hands, things proceed at the pace the current development team can handle. You're free to 
feel happy or sad about that.

Regards,

Geert

Op zaterdag 20 mei 2023 09:37:08 CEST schreef G R Hewitt:
> I agree with the sentiments WM expressed; I have had the growing feeling
> from reading the emails that pet projects are worked on in isolation to the
> main.
> It kind of reminds me of a model railway exhibition I once went to many
> moons ago. On one large display, all nicely set out, no trains were running
> as everyone involved was working on their particular pet project; the
> signals weren't working as they were all in bits as 'something new was
> being tried out',
> the power to the track wasn't on for the same reason, and people with
> trains to run were just hanging about with a cup of tea flicking switches
> in the
> hope that it, somehow, might work beyond the odd pulse of power that moved
> the train a few inches and then stopped - or worse ran the train backwards
> so it came off the lines.
> 
> On Fri, 19 May 2023 at 22:41, Wm <wm at ilipsis.net> wrote:
> > I think the balance between users of gnc and developers of gnc has
> > broken down.
> > 
> > My personal instinct is inclined towards development, towards software
> > getting better, being more inclusive, making things easier, you get the
> > drift.
> > 
> > Unfortunately it seems some personal projects got in the way of making
> > gnc 5 better for everyone.
> > 
> > The most obvious interaction fail is transaction completion which should
> > have been an improvement but has ended up as an "I'm right, you are all
> > wrong" issue :(
> > see 798829 – 5.0 transaction completion features are buggy (gnucash.org)
> > <https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=798829#c21> for details :(
> > 
> > For small organizations / charitable organizations / whatever they are
> > in your locale, v5 broke reporting in a significant way.
> > see 798809 – Multicolumn report error when reopened after saving.
> > (gnucash.org) <https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=798809>
> > why? because preparing a standard set of reports is what is expected of
> > small businesses, etc
> > it is understood, pretty much in every jurisdiction, that you start with
> > last year's balance sheet, you add in the income statement for the last