On 8/7/16 1:01 AM, Manuel Amador (Rudd-O) wrote:
On 08/05/2016 01:28 AM, Josh wrote:
Seeing other people's input on this topic, I suppose that there are
already lots of other good ways to achieve the same thing. Shell
aliases, shell scripts, scripts in other languages, editor hacks, etc.
are all far more flexible, allowing multiple commands, parsing and
processing of the output, interactivity, and so on. Sure, they do tie
you to a particular tool set, limiting portability, but that's true no
matter what: any system capable of describing non-trivial reports is
going to be so complex as to essentially be a complete programming
language, so we might as well just each pick an existing language we like.
I think the point is to have reports that users can download / share /
immediately exploit for their own personal use, such that they do not
have to come up with much integration or trust before they can use them.
We make a mistake when we tie functionality to specific text editors or
other platforms that users do not have or feel queasy about trying. I
know we've been burned by, e.g., the crappy reporting functionality in
GnuCash, but if we had a feature whereby people could define reports
that look nice to the eye and can be launched in a visual / printable
form (HTML?), and if those reports could be created by anyone who has
Web / GUI programming experience (but no Emacs experience), suddenly
you'd see a ton more reports flourish and be available for Ledger and
other command-line accounting tools.
Of course, the trick is to get the abstraction level right — as a person
who is using the program to query the data, I want the report and its
formatting to be mostly independent from the parameters I'm using to
gather the data.
THE most critical improvement that the command-line accounting
community can make, is getting reporting right. I was trying really
hard to get Ledger to give me the data via bindings so I could build an
unambiguous and error-free reporting system (both charts and textual
reports), but the crasher bugs in Ledger remain unfixed, and therefore I
cannot continue.
What could a more abstract and portable report specification look like ? Eg:
; report NAME REPORTTYPE PERIOD INTERVAL [ACCOUNTPAT] [MODIFIERS]
report trial-balance balance - - all
report balance-sheet-today balance -today - type:balancesheet
report income-statement-monthly balance -thismonth monthly
type:incomestatement depth:3 flat
report food-purchases-this-year register thisyear-today - expenses:food
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