--On March 1, 2012 9:09:38 AM -0800 John Ralls <[email protected]>
wrote:
F::Q hasn't published an update to CPAN since October 2009. Paul
Fenwick has moved the repo to github [1], but hasn't pushed anything
in a year.
I propose that we fork Fenwick's repo to our Gnucash Github account,
apply the outstanding patches, and adjust update-finance-quote to
pull tarballs from there.
Mike, you seem conversant with the F::Q code, are you up for
maintaining the GC fork?
As an aside, longer term it would be good to come up with a quote
retrieval mechanism that doesn't pull in an extra scripting
dependency and has something a bit more robust than screen scraping
for data retrieval.
Sure, I can maintain F::Q, but I don't have a Windows machine so I
can't do much with packaging it for Windows. I also can't put the new
version up on CPAN, of course, which means that the installer script
for MacOSX and other Unix variants will have to be changed. If we
install it ourselves where do we put it? I suspect that adding
packages to CPAN's directories behind its back isn't consider entirely
kosher. I see that the Windows install script uses ppm to install it
which would have to be changed too. I'm not really up on Perl all that
much, how hard is it to install private packages into an arbitrary Perl
installation?
Rewriting it would be non-trivial. The whole package is about 11,000
lines of Perl code (including comments). This includes modules for
nearly 50 quote sources, some of which could probably be skipped, but
it's still a fair amount of code. I also don't think you could
entirely avoid screen scraping. Many of the quote sources don't
provide a way to get the data otherwise. They probably don't encourage
that since they want you to see their ads.
I agree that the current situation is not really tenable, but forking
it isn't quite as easy as it seems at first glance. I don't know what
the right answer is.
Mike
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