[GNC] GnuCash getting worse?

[Chris Graves]

Thank goodness for this list!  We have people giving honest feedback and we have developers also giving honest feedback.  Users make mistakes, devs make mistakes, we all do, but this list is the epitome of what a discussion list should be about.  Fair, honest and respectful discussion -- proud to be a member!  Thank you all for your contributions.

Chris
> On Jul 20, 2024, at 12:58 PM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Jul 20, 2024, at 04:19, Nate Bargmann <n0nb at n0nb.us> wrote:
>> 
>> * On 2024 19 Jul 18:50 -0500, John Ralls wrote:
>>> As I said, I see that as a  issue. The column labels have
>>> to be terse and we can’t use per-item tooltips in the long run because
>>> the Gtk folks have pulled them from Gtk4. It’s not great that Geert
>>> changed the headings for the amount columns from Deposit and
>>> Withdrawal to Amount and Amount(negated) but forgot to change the
>>> intro screen to reflect it.
>> 
>> If GTK4 is demonstrably worse for non-GNOME applications, why use it?
>> Non-GNOME applications should remain on GTK3.  Time and time again GNOME
>> people have insinuated that GTK is only intended for GNOME and not
>> really for third party/independent applications.  I state this as one
>> who dutifully ported a niche app from GTK2 to GTK3 and learned what a
>> train wreck GTK4 is for such an app and am entirely discouraged about
>> the future of GTK.
>> 
>> What was the rationale for changing column names from deposit/withdrawal
>> to this ambiguous wording?  Already GNC's column layout is opposite of
>> the manual check registers I've been using for 40+ years and that leads
>> to mistakes in one or the other for me so the last thing that is needed
>> is more ambiguity.
>> 
>> Apologies if I'm missing something by jumping in so late.
> 
> We had to switch to  Gtk3 because WebKitGtk stopped supporting Gtk2 and the Linux Distros aren’t going to hold an old version of WebKitGtk for GnuCash. That will happen with Gtk4 at some point. Since then we’ve been distributing GnuCash using flatpak, and that depends on the current or previous version of the Gnome runtime. The Gnome runtime maintainers could will sooner or later drop support for Gtk3 and they won’t tell us in advance.
> 
> For CSV import  “Deposit” and “Withdrawal” were no less ambiguous than “Amount” and “Amount (negated)”. The former make sense if and only if your bank’s CSV exports have both a debit and credit column (usually backwards to your own books) and neither is signed. Many banks don’t: They export a single column of signed numbers. Sometime the signs match up with what GnuCash wants (+ is debit, - is credit), sometimes they’re the other way around. Other banks will use two columns but will put - signs on one of the columns. After some time wrestling with how to deal with all of the variations Geert settled on using Amount for an amount column where the sign matches what GnuCash expects and Amount (negated) for an amount column where the sign is reversed to what GnuCash expects.
> 
> Check registers and reports from banks are nearly always oriented towards the bank’s viewpoint, where your account is a liability. GnuCash is about accounting from your viewpoint where your bank account is an asset. If you’re not interested in formal bookkeeping from your viewpoint it doesn’t make sense for you to use GnuCash. A personal finance manager program like KMyMoney would work better for you.
> 
> Regards,
> John Ralls
> 
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