On Tue, 2006-08-08 at 11:56 +0200, Graham Leggett wrote: > I have reached the point where Gnucash in it's current form is no longer > useful, and I have to make a decision to either a) develop the software > further and submit patches for inclusion into the trunk, or b) drop > Gnucash and invest the effort in something else.
Or c) take a fork, and develop it in the direction you want it to go. Personally, I think that would be bad for all concerned, but if you feel strongly enough about it, this is an option for you. > So far, evidence suggests that even if I coded up patches, they would be > rejected, because, as you state very clearly, "this is not out goal for > Gnucash, period". > This is very unfortunate, as Gnucash has an excellent user interface, and > would make a very good platform for a larger accounting system. The point that Christian and Derek are making is that it is not the goal of the developers, and accordingly they are not going to support any change that requires a lot of work from them but gets them no nearer to what they want to achieve with the program. If you can come up with a plan and process that will achieve your goals, and which does not require them to completely rewrite the rest of the program, your plan will be considered on its merits (primarily for stability, future growth options and long term maintainability). > > Not helpful. It rather seems to me you haven't understood how such a > > volunteer-based project works at all. > Having been involved for many years with one of the largest (and oldest) > volunteer software projects, I would disagree, but then you are free to > believe what you will. Surely you must understand that the current developers devote staggering amounts of their own personal time to develop and maintain gnucash. They each of them have their own bugbears that they work on to bring the program closer to what they want from the software. If I may dare to put words into their mouths, that and a desire to preserve probably the best free software accounting program are their primary motivation for the considerable amounts of work they do for our benefit. You cannot fault them for rejecting any suggestion that they should devote the next several years worth of their precious development time to your suggestion instead of working on issues and features which are affecting them or which they believe are important. This is all the more the case given that we have just come from a period of development which has been very short on new features because of the significant amounts of rewriting that were necessary to implement the gnome2 conversion. You can hardly be surprised that a suggestion that you want them to do the same all over again (only bigger) is not leaped (is that correct American spelling?) on with great joy. Now, if you are actually suggesting that you want to undertake this project, and that you are prepared to make it work alongside the current gnome2 interface, then I dare say the developers will be very happy to hear your thoughts on how you might achieve this and will offer constructive suggestions on what is and is not workable. Personally, I can see some value to a web interface. But there are some very fundamental issues that need to be addressed before I think such an interface is a viable option. The first and foremost of those would be the ability to support multiple simultaneous users, and the second would be to complete the separation of the gui from the logic. These both introduce further dependencies (not the least of which is addressing the issue of the data storage backend). In short, you are not suggesting a small project. If you want to see gnucash move in that direction, by all means start planning and discussing it. If you were to undertake one of the outstanding issues I pointed out above (or others I'm not aware of), I suspect you will be quite actively encouraged and helped. But please do understand that we do not have a pool of developers to throw at the idea. You will be supported and encouraged as long as you are not breaking things, but unless you can attract other people to assist you, the current developers have their hands more then full enough with what they want to achieve. Conrad. _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
