On Feb 24, 2009, at 9:00 AM, Mark Carter wrote:
I have played around with various accounting packages, including my home-brewed effort. I am currently using MS Money 2004 on Parallels on OS X. I am rethinking my approach. I haven't been able to get ledger or hledger to compile on OS X. I haven't compiled ledger on Ubuntu, either; it seems to get stuck on boost_filessystem, or something. I think I managed to get ledger to compile once, but that was in the past.
Have you tried "port install ledger" via MacPorts?
My thought on ledger is that "there's too much code", and relies on some external packages like boost, making it a pain to set up. In the past, I had expressed an interest in producing an NPV calculator for ledger via a shell script. The problem is, ledger's output isn't in a form that makes this convenient. I can't help but thinking that within ledger, there's a much simpler idea waiting to get out.
You will be able to use Ledger as a Python library in 3.0, so that you can just use its core as a calculation engine if you prefer.
Note that I do plan on offering a .pkg binary installer for OS X once we get closer to the release.
This has led me to seriously start reconsidering putting some polish on my own accounting package to be much more robust and generic. The kind of thing I had in mind to produce is an accounting package as a python library, input via a single stream, and a mechanism for extensible syntax. There's a way to go before it's up to snuff, though.
Also take a look at "beancount", which is all in Python. John
