On Apr 6, 2012, at 6:10 AM, Wm Tarr wrote: > Can't find an exact previous thread point to add onto as there have been many > here and in gnucash-user so apols for starting a new thread about something > some people may consider well done by now. > > perl's Finance::Quote is what it is. > > Getting quotes from google finance has been mentioned (can't find the posting > right now) > > I'd like to throw in http://getquote-tedsoft.blogspot.co.uk/ as a possible > alternative too. It is OOo / LibreOffice friendly; the author isn't (as far > as I can see) anti general use and has noticed the same malfunctioning we > have through Finance::Quote (i.e. the problem wasn't Finance::Quote per se). > > My thoughts are: > > 1) if someone is doing intra-day trading or similar then they shouldn't be > using GnuCash to get prices, I see GnuCash getting prices as a weekly , once > a day at most, idea of what my stuff may be worth. > > 2) Is the perceived problem > > 2.i) Finance::Quote itself? > > 2.ii) Finance::Quote needing perl? (fine for me but maybe not for all) > > 2.iii) Finance::Quote not meeting the needs of users in adaptation to > scraped sources changing? > > 2.iv) Something else? > > 3) perl can be trimmed down to only the necessary bits, that can be made part > of the install (a minimalistic perl is very small) > > 4) we can presume most people have some sort of Java (rather than, say, perl > or python) on their systems these days and try approaching the author of > getquote to see if he is interested in playing with our project. > > 5) we make GnuCash's price source independent of source by defining an > interface. i.e. the user uses their preferred price source and presents it > to GnuCash in an agreed format. this will involve simple helper scripts as I > see it. > > Any thoughts on this? > > To some extent I am trying to defuse the "GnuCash is broken because it won't > get the stuff for my shares" thing as there is more to it than that. >
The main problem with F::Q at the moment is that it's not being very well maintained. The main impact is your 2.iii, particularly with regard to Yahoo!. It's not so much an issue of embedding Perl (though I don't know how much work that would be for the Win32 distribution) although IMO the Gnucash download is already way too big. Much more at issue is that F::Q depends on a long list of other packages, and CPAN is widely reported not to work well on Win32 -- which is why ActiveState have their own packaging mechanism, and in turn why we depend on users installing ActiveState Perl. No, I don't think that one can assume that a JRE is universally installed... but that doesn't mean that we couldn't tell people to install one instead of ActiveState Perl in order to get quotes. We're much too small a fish to define an interface and be able to expect anyone else to support it. If there are quote programs out there that export, Gnucash could certainly be configured to import their quotes -- someone would have to step up to do the work, the current devs are focussed on other things. Regards, John Ralls _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
