[GNC] GnuCash getting worse?

[R Losey]

On Tue, Jan 2, 2024 at 6:24 PM Dave Hayes <dave at jetcafe.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:21:57 -0600
> R Losey <rlosey at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I was just expressing concern that the last few releases seem far more
> > bug-ridden than I remember any of the 4.x releases being.
>
> Speaking as a long time gnucash user and an active computer scientist,
> I'd like to point out that some of these bugs are in the toolkits and
> libraries
> that gnucash uses. Open source has always suffered from this idea: a
> toolkit
> that seemed awesome a while ago can experience extreme technical debt due
> to
> the rapid movement of the software industry. In some cases, said toolkit
> can
> actually become detrimental to projects that use it.
>
> This is why (unless you are actually a gnucash dev) trying to
> quantitatively
> measure the project's "goodness" is quite likely an exercise in subjective
> futility. :)
>
> Just my $0.02 USD.
>

Fair enough, but I don't agree. Yes, each release has some minor problems
associated with it, and often it IS related to underlying toolkits.

But 5.4 left a process running on Windows, which kept the lock file open,
and generally confused users. This is not a toolkit issue.  And now 5.5 has
some serious issues with Scheduled Transactions. These are clearly GnuCash
bugs, and I don't recall problems like this in previous releases.  For
years, I've always been able to update to the latest release, and now I've
had to skip two in a row.  That **may** be merely subjective.

Overall, I think GnuCash is a great program; I'm grateful to the developers
for it, and I hope it is never abandoned. My intent was to note that the
last two releases have had fairly serious bugs -- I recall an earlier 5.x
release that actually needed a second release to fix some problem.

-- 
_________________________________
Richard Losey
rlosey at gmail.com
Micah 6:8