It's been rumoured that Christopher Browne said:
>
> > As I got out in the Free Software world, telling people about how
> > great gnucash is, I still have people asking me how their data is
> > stored, and asking if they can edit the files by hand. Just last week
> > someone said, "Well, I guess it is okay if there is a way I can export
> > to text, and import elsewhere. I just _hate_ it when someone thinks
> > they can hold _my data_ hostage."
>
> It seems to me that this is still the most significant MAJOR problem
> with GnuCash at this point in time.
>
> There _NEEDS_ to be a data format, possibly the "text export,"
> that can both be exported _AND IMPORTED_.
Arghh, this conversation is infuriating, since its been going on for
years, and no one cares enough o fix it.
This is trivial to implement, and there are several posibilities.
1) the curent gnucash file format is actually a byte stream. If you
want ascii, it would be straightforward to cut-n-paste the FileIO.C
and replace all occurances of 'int i; write (fd, &i, 4);' with
printf ("%d\n", i); This is almost trivial to do. Do it!
2) the current auditing mechanism writes *all* transactions out in
*plain ascii*, thereby allowig anyone of reasonable cleverness to
reconstruct everything that was done at the gui.
3) the gnucash data is not hard to traverse. Any number of reports
traverse the data and mangle it into html. It would be fairly
trivial to create a 'report' that output .e.g. QIF instead of html.
--linas
