On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Jeremy Collins wrote:
> What draws programmers to other projects? What repels them from
> Gnucash?
I can't tell you what other programers think of GnuCash, but I can tell
you my opinion about the problem: Gnucash tries to use every possible
feature in program developping.
When I downloaded Gnucash from the CVS repository, I found a program that
aimed for having "all" GUI's and "all" extension languages. From what I
read from the documentation files, my conclusion was that gnucash is more
a "programming exercise" than a financial program. I had to install half a
dozen packages to make it compile, two of them (nana and swig) I never
heard about.
GnuCash has now 3 GUI's, none of which is complete, Motif, the most
complete one is deprecated, from what I understand. IMHO you should decide
upon a GUI, and concentrate your efforts on that one. You should erase the
other GUI's from the source directories. Later, when that GUI is *finised*
(not just stable or functional) you can begin working on other GUI's as
well.
One other problem with GnuCash is that it uses two extension languages,
each language having it's partisans :) . One might say that you can write
exensions in the language of your choice, but the truth is you must
consult both perl and scheme files to write extensions, that is, you must
know *both* languages. Again, IMHO, you should decide upon one language
and concentrate your efforts on it.
The third problem with Gnucash is that all of you guys rush into adding
new features before finising the coding of previous ones. For example the
gnucash engine was developped up to a point, declared good enough and you
moved on. It still has "hack allert" comments but no one's working on
them.
And some thoughts about extensibility... Of course having an extensible
program is considerent a great asset (much like using OO design), however
most of the people that will use Gnucash will not be accountants. They
will need a program that *manages* their finences and not a program that
allows them to write extensions for managing finances. In the Gnucash
case, being able to write extensions is important only for developers,
most users will be satisfied with some preference file.
OK, so these are my thoughs about the Gnucash project... A year ago I
looked for a finance program under linux and I found xacc with a link to
gnucash. I installed xacc for my use and tried to install gnucash. I
wanted to help developping it but it took me more than a month to compile
it. Than, I had some hard time understanding the code. Later I was busy
with my master thesis... Now that the thesis is almost finished I think of
involwing myself a little in the developping. I hope I will be able to
help you guys with something...
Best regards,
alex.
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