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GnuCash - A Call For Help
sedition writes "GnuCash developer Benoit Gregoire has written the State of the GnuCash Project. It is a call for help to the Open Source community regarding the open-source accounting software for Linux, Mac OSX, and more. GnuCash is one of the largest (287,853 lines of code), but least publicized Open Source projects. Now it needs developer support, as its future is uncertain."
For a moment there I thought RMS was claiming to have invented money.
10,000 GNU dollars to the project.
Why have the crispy US dollars backed by the Treasury and US Government when we can have GNUCash?
How did it get so many lines of code if it isn't very well known? Do we have one coder slaving away on this one?
Sorry, I know I'll get modded down to nothing, but I've got Karma to burn and this just cracked me up:
Mortgage and Loan Repayment druid and many, many others.
I imagined the barbarian horde from those Capital One "What's In Your Wallet?" ads fighting it out with the Loan Repayment druids, like something from Star Wars II or The Two Towers.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
- Write free software
- Ask for developers on Slashdot to share the pain with you
- Profit!!
Impressive!Why don't we have GnuCash selling licenses to those who actually need and are willing to pay for it? This way the company can hire more people if the project turns out to be interesting and needed by many people. It's radical, but seems to work for lots of other little guys.
As someone who uses Gnucash (I'm an accountant, too) I had no idea the project was in trouble. This is one of the best programs I've come across in the Linux world, and I think it's superior to similar commercial packages. The operation is closer to how you're taught to do accounting, and I love it for that. Well, if someone out there knows how a sympathetic non-coder could lend a hand, let me know. Yes, I did RTFA, and I didn't see a way to contribute without knowing how to hack code.
IAAL
"You have been recruited by the GNU League to defend the frontier against Gates and the Quicken armada..."
GNUCash calls for help ?
or GNU calls cash help ?
I personally like the idea of having alternatives to proprietary software.
Here's the rest. I'm not posting AC because of the new troll technique (posting "creatively modified" mirror text).
What core developers should do to help future developers
There are many reasons for our difficulties to attract developers and other contributors, but it all comes back to the same problem: real or perceived, the barrier to entry is too high. To get more developers, we must make it easier to contribute to GnuCash. "Casual" hacking on GnuCash to scratch an itch is much to hard, even for an experienced developer.
Work on the developer documentation problem
There is no complete and current architecture and API reference. Now that we've put the doxygen plumbing in place, we must make sure that ALL functions that are in public headers ARE documented, even if only by saying "Document me!", so the doxygen docs become truly authoritative. Then put the docs on the web site. We must also write a report writing Howto: We already have some very powerful reports, but this is the single most common offer for help we receive "Hi, I'd like to write "foo" report for GnuCash, can someone help me or point me to documentation on that subject". Sometimes I wonder if anyone knows anymore... So the answer is always the same: 'there isn't any; use the source Luke'. We are wasting the chance to hook countless new developers.
Fix core capabilities in the engine
Existing developers should focus on architecture issues and completing existing core features that only they can realistically tackle, such as Lots (which are needed to support accounting periods) or fixing the problems in the scheduled transactions, so that new developers can build on that functionality.
Improve interoperability with other software or new modules
GnuCash has a great, powerful multi-user financial engine that many people ask to plug into. Unfortunately much of this power is locked away. There is no way to interface with a running GnuCash (the RPC backend and perl bindings have bitrotted), there is no way to start a new instance while passing parameters like "import this file". We need a wrapper that will start GnuCash if it isn't already started and pass API requests to it, with or without GUI. The current module system needs to be completed or replaced. It's hard for new developers to integrate new modules in the build and menu system (we need a howto on that too...). Also, data import isn't enough, we must also support export to inter-operate with other software. (LibOfx should get us there if I can just find time to work on it).
I think fixing/developing external interfaces and writing additional import and export support should greatly help our developer crunch in the medium term, by consolidating part of financial software development in the free software ecosystem. We have received many, many inquiries from people wanting to integrate gnucash with (name of web system, database, payroll, kde front end or whatever). We can't afford to loose these people, whether or not the core developers like their pet project. We must use the gnome 2 port as an opportunity to finish/cleanup/document our interfaces and from then on answer "I don't know if your idea will work, but you're welcome to try; here's the relevant documents to get you started."
What developers should do to help users and decrease developer load
Make sure the mailing lists are easily searchable
And/or document how to properly search them (Google isn't cutting it).
Get more people write access to the website
We have received many offers to help, but turned most of them down for no good reason. The website is nice, but it isn't up to date, it's a source of frustration, misleading to users and future developers, and pointlessly increases traffic on gnucash-user and the #gnucash IRC channel.
Quickly implement a Wiki or similar system
This will allow us to have an effective place to point users on gnucash-user
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
...in brinance a command-line driven ledger app. I like it. Have a look.
It requires online registration, then writes that information to the boot sector of your hard disk?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Actually, although you are right about it having a Byzantine list of dependencies--it has NOT been ported to Gnome 2 yet (that is part of the problem!), plus it is the only application of its kind. In my mind this is a Killer App (TM), which is one main reason I have for using Linux and staying with it...I am certainly on my way over to #gnucash to help out as much as I can.
"Life is tough but we're tougher. You only get what you give, so give all that you've got." --Tony LaRussa
Why is Gnucash unpopular? Because 3 out of every 4 people I've talked with who've wanted to try it couldn't satisfy the dependencies for their distribution (most of these people aren't newbies to Linux either.)
That said, it truly is in a league of its own in the Linux software world, and I hope it finds what it's looking for in new developers.
Disclaimer: I haven't used it for a year or more, so it may have overcome some of this already
Damn, imagine what I could do with a quarter of a million lines of python code. Seriously C is a great language for systems work, but writing accounting packages in C is just not the way to go.
Got Code?
I gave up on trying to use GnuCash long ago due to the impossibility of compiling it, and getting it to run.
They used large numbers of libraries, which you had to locate yourself. No links to the proper versions either. You needed specific versions of those libraries, some no longer available from that libraries web site, and some pulled from CVS at some unspecified time (and no other time would work).
The database it used was their own creation (why should we use an existing library for the database? That would only add another dependency, but here's another error logging library that we can't live without). It was unaccessable to mere humans, and messed up the database all too frequently.
After they added yet another round of libraries (several of them not yet available on the web), I finally gave up. It was simply unbuildable and unusable, and I could not forsee it as ever becoming usable, let alone ever be able to compile it.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Well, it sounds good in theory, but really, all you're gonna get is "In Soviet Russia, MONEY watches YOU!" comments and goatse.cx links hidden in the code.
Potential? GnuCash _works_. It has 250k lines of code written already. Frankly, it's one of the best Linux apps I've ever used, and has a very sane interface. Then again, I've never used Quicken, so what do I know?
Why you're advocating throwing away a perfectly good program that just needs some more developers and documentation is totally beyond me. A dedicated documentation effort for GnuCash would probably only take a month to do, max.
If I had to hazard a guess, you're not a software developer. Re-inventing the wheel every ten minutes is a bigger waste of time than trying to fix a slightly old, good one.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Boy was I wrong. I figured out the take-out-of-one-account-to-credit-another system, but I couldn't figure out how to put money into the system.
Transfer money from an income account.
Money leaves the system when you transfer it to an expense account.
This is nice because it shows you where your money comes from and where it goes, instead of stipulating that it appears and disappears in your asset accounts (savings, checking, etc). I can tell you exactly how much money I've spent on automobile-related expenses since I started using GNU-cash. Or how much money I've made from my second job. Or how much money I've paid in FICA tax.
Hmm, I'm wondering how does Red Hat makes money. They sell only open source software. WAIT! Wait!!!! What did I say? They sell some free software!!!?!?!
Excerpt from the GPL:
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I am not sure what affords GnuCash the title of "least publicized," as I've heard the title many times and infact it came with RedHat whenever I last installed that.
/. that two major things keeping me away from using Linux is the lack of any sort of decent finance management software and an Outlook-type thing. My whole life is in MS Money and Outlook.
Some months ago I said on
I heard things about GnuCash being hopeless to install unless it came packaged with your distro, so I was excited when I found out that the version of RH about to come out will include it.
Thus began my most-recent attempt to switch to Linux. I exported my Outlook archives into Evolution, and my Ms Money accounts into GnuCash.
It lasted about a week. By the end of the week I was thoroughly dissapointed with the mediocrity of both of the pieces of software. Yes, they are usable. yes, GnuCash added up numbers together, but no,the user experience was mediocre compared to what I was used to with my Microsoft applications. That, and the shitty sound support, eventually made me say "fuck it" and switch back to Win2k and I'm happily using it since.
I think most everyone agrees that GnuCash is a critical piece of software for the Linux desktop. Yes. Absolutely....
GnuCash is a long program (well at work we deal with about 150 times that much code..) but from a user perspective of someone who's known better, it sucks. I am glad that the focus isn't only to find more coders. What this thing needs is some normal human beings using it and saying "you know what, it's NOT acceptable that window A obscures window B and freezes while window B is waiting for input from me." It needs, I am sorry to say, Quicken or MS Money users, who say "It was really easy to do X, Y, and Z, but here, I can't even figure out if it's possible,"
Good luck to this project, absolutely. Maybe - evnetually - projects like this will mature and become useful to people who don't care about open source and don't hate Microsoft. Yes, GnuCash appeals if you're maniacal about those things. It does not appeal if you're looking for better and more useable software. Unfortunately, a lot of Linux stuff can be described thusly.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
GnuCash is a full-fleged dual entry accounting system: you can run your business accounting with it.
Quicken and Money are not: they are just good for keeping track of your personal bank accounts.
The bold text above may not mean anything to you, and it meant nothing to me until about a year ago when I started learning some accounting stuff. I don't know why accounting is so excruciatingly painful to learn for us developers... but once you finally get it, you realize that it is actually not that complicated, and why it simply works. Now, while I'm still a developer and not an accountant, even for my personal finance, I will not do without dual entry. I tried Kmymoney and Microsoft Money, but they just don't cut it. Now I can't live without GnuCash.
Please, do not let GnuCash die. If you can help that project, by all means, please do.
I code, therefore I am.
I was thinking of writing the exact same thing.
:)
If it were in Python, I might volunteer to help myself.
Seriously, can anyone name ONE SINGLE advantage that C (or even C++) has over Python for this type of app? Certainly, Python is fast enough -- so what if it has to cycle through all your records once in a while. That's not going to take all day. With C/C++ you have to worry about all kinds of low level crap like buffer overflows. You shouldn't have to think about that kind of thing when writing applications that involve business logic. You should only have to focus on the application logic, something Python lets you do much better than C/C++ does.
Hi,
I'm one of the newer developers on Kmymoney2. We are currently re-writing the services layer to become a fully double-entry accounting program. We are looking to add support for investments, loans, mortgages, etc, and are switching to a XML file support instead of binary. We are also trying to keep up with the latest KDE3 widgets and adding QIF support as well. International support is also high on our feature list. (I apologize to any team members if I left out your feature that your working on.)
Our next version is probably a bit away, but it should make us much more competitive to GnuCash in the future (esp. with the double-entry accounting).
Yes, but the idea here is that instead of having to find the option on the menu that allows me to get the pie-chart report of my expenditures, I can just look on the accounts page and say, oh!, I bought $143.04 worth of books this year! (Actual figure -- I just finished balancing my checkbook with GnuCash last night.)
*And*, if you go to Reports... Income & Expense... Expense Piechart, you can get the piechart for the whole year or whatever, plus all the other reports you could ever want.
your confused though, GNUcash really isn't supposed to be a personal finance app. It's supposed to be for accounting. This isn't a quicken/ms money replacement, this is a Quickbooks/peachtree replacement.
Well I admit I went ahead and read most of the comments while I was waiting for the server to respond.... And a lot of the criticism of the GnuCash team sounded reasonable. But, after reading the FA, I have to say... Go GnuCash, and that accountant guy who loves it so much should write a book about how to use it, in collaboration with the developers who are currently documenting the API.
/. community... they didn't come here, we (or, at least the /. editors) brought the story here. So, how about some constructive responses to their plan? I think if they can get half of it done in the next few months, the project will live and evolve for many more years. Sounds like the compromise of using C and Scheme could work great here (you Python developers are trolling), as long as the core and plugin functionality are well divided. Not knowing what their code looks like, I wondered how well that has been done to date.
Enough of the bitching from the
On a related note, I would suggest one more thing to those who wish to see this plan bear fruit: Reduce the dependency tree!! That will need to happen, any way you cut it. I'm sure this is possible if the developers attack it from all possible angles.
----
Not to be confused with Col.
Just using Mozilla isn't good enough. Using GtkHTML makes the GUI far, far cleaner and lets us embed graphs in ways you simply can't do using Mozilla.
There are so many things wrong with the standard Quicken format that your comment is almost comical - chief amongst them being that there is no standard Quicken format. It is a complete clusterfsck, and I take my hat off the developers who managed to make head or tail of it. As for a text format, that's what XML is, and parsing it is a no-brainer in just about any language you care to name. Perhaps you'd care to write a robust parser for your wonderful error-free format?
As to the general thrust of your comments, yes, it would be nice if a few gnome libraries were merged IMHO, and in hindsight maybe Python would have been a better choice as a scripting language (not because of the merits or otherwise of Scheme - Scheme is a wonderful language) but because it would have lowered the barriers to entry for GnuCash development. But back when I was a developer, the general view was that it was our job to write software, and it was the job of distributions to package it up so that Joe Average didn't need to compile it himself. Debian always managed to make it a no-brainer install. Why can't every other friggin' distro manage it?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)