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Programming Linux Business IT Technology

GnuCash - A Call For Help 479

Posted by simoniker from the gnu-blood-needed dept.
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."
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GnuCash - A Call For Help More

GnuCash - A Call For Help

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  • Gnu/Cash? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:21PM (#6670707)
    For a moment there I thought RMS was claiming to have invented money.

  • I've just donated (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:21PM (#6670712)
    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?

  • All by their lonesome? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tevenson ( 625386 ) <tevenson@gmail.cTWAINom minus author> on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:22PM (#6670727) Homepage
    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?
    • Perhaps a more important question is, WHY does it have so many lines of code ? Unless it is written in assembly, I can't even imagine that the application NEEDS as many lines of code as perl or Postgresql. Maybe THAT is their problem.

      • Re:All by their lonesome? (Score:5, Funny)

        by nutznboltz ( 473437 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @07:15PM (#6671168) Homepage Journal
        The Tao of Programming has two things to say about this:

        1. There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: ``Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?''

          ``An operating system,'' replied the programmer.

          The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. ``Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system,'' he said.

          ``Not so,'' said the programmer, ``when designing an accounting package, the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design.''

          The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. ``That is all good and well, but which is easier to debug?''

          The programmer made no reply.
        2. A novice programmer was once assigned to code a simple financial package.

          The novice worked furiously for many days, but when his master reviewed his program, he discovered that it contained a screen editor, a set of generalized graphics routines, an artificial intelligence interface, but not the slightest mention of anything financial.

          When the master asked about this, the novice became indignant. ``Don't be so impatient,'' he said, ``I'll put in the financial stuff eventually.''

      • GnuCash is written in C. There is your answer. Languages like Python, Lisp or Smalltalk would make it a lot shorter, but at the same time people would complain that it depends on "non-standard" languages (C and C++ are the de facto standards in Linux)
      • Perhaps a more important question is, WHY does it have so many lines of code ?

        That might be one of the reasons why they feel it is becoming unmaintainable. I think all the contribution is cool, but it's probably time to stop adding new features and spend most of the time making the existing codebase maintainable and well-documented (they mention some of that in the article). It's actually something I'm highly interested in, and if I could find a way to get involved without getting even less sleep than

  • Druids? (Score:5, Funny)

    by RobertB-DC ( 622190 ) * on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:23PM (#6670729) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Helping out a Slash-dotted friend... (Score:3, Informative)

    by ansak ( 80421 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:23PM (#6670732) Homepage Journal
    gnucash.org seems to be "benefiting" from the publicity. Here's the first part of Benoit's post for those who care:

    State of the GnuCash project, a call for help

    The GnuCash project is having a hard time. I think most everyone agrees that GnuCash is a critical piece of software for the Linux desktop. It's also one the largest free software projects. How big is it? GnuCash currently has 287,853 physical source lines of code (SLOC). For example, had the current GnuCash CVS been included in RedHat 7.1, it would come in 21st position in code size (see http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/). At that time, the current GnuCash CVS source would have been pretty similar in size to qt, postgresql or perl, about 60% of Gimp and between 12% and 16% of Xfree, Mozilla or the Linux kernel. Although GnuCash comes up in every discussion of needed software to get Linux on the desktop, the GnuCash project currently has only about seven active developers (active being used very loosely here, considering I included myself) and enjoys far less exposure than many projects of a similar size.

    We may be headed for a dead end if we don't reorganize and refocus our efforts. GnuCash badly needs more manpower (not just developers), and needs to get it quickly.
    How did we get here

    Of course, every project could always use more developers, but the consecutive demise of both Gnumatic and Linux Developers Group caused the loss of most of GnuCash's core developers two years ago. The few volunteers that were left focused on new features, in the hopes of attracting users and hopefully also developers. We've managed to take it to 1.8.5 (to be released in a few days), and in the process GnuCash gained Small Business features, Scheduled Transactions, a completely new import UI with Bayesian filtering, OFX and HBCI support, Mortage and Loan Repayment druid, and many, many others. We are very proud of it and we clearly have more users judging from traffic on gnucash-users, and all should now be well in GnuCash-land.

    Not quite. We didn't attract many new developers and all those new features have to be maintained and debugged. They also represent a huge tech support burden, since most of the features were not documented properly due to time constraints. GnuCash has grown too large for the current developers to properly debug and maintain the current code base, add new features and write documentation, all at the same time.

    I hate to admit it, but in our quest for new features, choices had to be made and a lot of important things are currently being neglected. If the GnuCash project can't manage to attract more contributors and refocus the efforts of those it already has, it's going to become unmanageable. We often say that Linux would survive even if Linus got hit by a bus. Well, right now I am not too certain that GnuCash would currently survive if Derek Atkins got hit by a bus.

    So now I'll try to suggest some solutions...

    (that's as far as I could get)

    • The rest... (Score:5, Informative)

      by RobertB-DC ( 622190 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:30PM (#6670793) Homepage Journal
      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

  • By George! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:24PM (#6670743)
    I think they just came up with the missing part:
    1. Write free software
    2. Ask for developers on Slashdot to share the pain with you
    3. Profit!!
    Impressive!

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:25PM (#6670747)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • GNUcash is so complex. Why anyone would want to develop or even usefor the GNUcash project is a mystery to me (maybe if you're an accountant). Better to develop for Kmymoney2 [sourceforge.net], a nice KDE/Qt C++ app, which behaves more like Quicken and Microsoft Money, the two most popular money managment apps. Kmymoney2 is the only real alternative to GNUcash for the future in my opinion. Let GNUcash die, and some new apps will come...

    • Re:GNUcash sucks, Kmymoney2 better (Score:5, Funny)

      by sharkey ( 16670 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:34PM (#6670838)
      which behaves more like Quicken

      It requires online registration, then writes that information to the boot sector of your hard disk?

      • Re:GNUcash sucks, Kmymoney2 better (Score:4, Funny)

        by generic-man ( 33649 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @10:28PM (#6672201) Homepage Journal
        That's TurboTax.

        If it behaved like Quicken, it would constantly nag you to pay $80 to unlock the "Premier" edition and advertise every co-branded financial service in existence.

        Would you like a Quicken credit card? A Quicken loan? A free credit check? Free credit protector for 30 days? No? Then what do you want?

        You want to reconcile your checkbook? Please wait while we charge your credit card to unlock Quicken Premier. Would you like 1045 free hours of AOL with that?

        (sigh) I've been using Quicken since version 1, and I still remember the horror the first time I saw banner ads inside a program I paid good money to use.

    • Better to develop for Kmymoney2, a nice KDE/Qt C++ app, which

      behaves more like Quicken and Microsoft Money, the two most popular money managment apps.

      (emphesis my own)
      So since it looks, smells and acts like popular apps it must be good right? I hate this attitude because it stifles innovation. If you are always trying to play catch-up to the latest version of the hot software of the moment you will never become the hot app.
      GnuCash brings a new method of money management to the table (accounts) and one I p

      • Re:GNUcash sucks, Kmymoney2 better (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        GnuCash brings a new method of money management to the table (accounts)

        How is this new? I took an accounting course back in high school, and Gnucash works almost exactly like what I learned (general ledger, accounts, etc.).

        How do other popular applications handle things?
        • Other applications (QuickBooks) suck. QuickBooks either sucks so bad it doesn't do a lot of the accounting stuff I "learned" in the university or they had a bunch of accountants write the software that know nothing about usability. This means that the software is about as easy to use and understand as the archaeic accounting programs that were developed in mainframe text environments or under DOS. Regardless, the end result is that I have not been able to make QuickBooks do everything I wanted it to and,
      • GnuCash brings a new method of money management to the table (accounts)

        True, but truly this method has not been successful, at least as implemented by the GNUcash team. Thus, let it die. I don't really see how GNUcash "innovates" as you say. The only real innovation I see is that they have one of the largest developer to lines of code ratios, have more dependancies than a handicapped person, and the program has managed to look roughly the same for the past 3 years since I first used it, with still no s

      • Re:GNUcash sucks, Kmymoney2 better (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Aadain2001 ( 684036 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @07:01PM (#6671071) Journal
        A good test of a new program is how easy it is to use the first time you sit down with it.

        With MS Money (now there's a scary term ;)), everything seemed logical, easy to use, and down right intuitive. Sure, they weren't perfect and they is plenty of room for improvement, but it was a good program that was almost fun to use.

        With GnuCash, I had to fight to use the program. The whole layout/ideology seemed very odd if not completely stupid. I didn't want to spend half a day fighting with the program on setting up accounts or entering transactions just to do what MS money let me do in just a few minutes of setup. And just FYI, I hadn't used MS Money is about 3 years when I sat down with GnuCas just a few months ago, so the reason I was fighting the program was not because I was used the the MS way.

        Make the money management program simple to use for simple things, and let it make complex things doable. GnuCash does not do this. Neither does MS Money. But at least MS Money let me do the simple things simply without having to fight it. I for one would be glad to see GnuCash follow MS Money in that respect, and then watch it surpass MS Money.

    • Re:GNUcash sucks, Kmymoney2 better (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tamnir ( 230394 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @07:05PM (#6671091)
      GNUcash is so complex. Why anyone would want to develop or even usefor the GNUcash project is a mystery to me (maybe if you're an accountant). Better to develop for Kmymoney2 [sourceforge.net], a nice KDE/Qt C++ app, which behaves more like Quicken and Microsoft Money, the two most popular money managment apps. Kmymoney2 is the only real alternative to GNUcash for the future in my opinion. Let GNUcash die, and some new apps will come...


      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.
    • Quicken sucks, the missing hole in the linux software array is a quickbooks/peachtree type app for accountants. This is what stops linux from entering the small business arena.

  • Here's a workable solution (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:26PM (#6670751)
    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.

  • Wish I could code... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pettifogger ( 651170 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:27PM (#6670762)
    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.

    • Re:Wish I could code... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:34PM (#6670837) Homepage Journal
      Maybe you could write a sort of "Why-To" - explain to people why to use a double-entry system like Gnucash as opposed to single-entry systems out there.

      You could give folks some good advice as to what sort of accounts to set up so that when tax time comes around, they can better track what's what.

    • Even though I've been in biz for over 20 years I know dick all about accounting and fully rely on very excellent experts.

      Mind you I do know how to program, and 278K of code is not all that big. I've built much bigger systems in the past.

      So, in short I think you have a good suggestion here and perhaps if the accounting professionals team up with the developers good things might happen!

    • Re:Wish I could code... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by infiniti99 ( 219973 ) <justin@affinix.com> on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:41PM (#6670899) Homepage
      Maybe with a financial donation? Perhaps the GNUcash people could set up a pledge system where a bunch of folks can promise to pay some money and then when a certain number of pledges are made, everyone donates their part. The "keep GNUCash alive" fund or something.

      And before anyone says that paying for open source software is backwards, remember that you're paying for software freedom. That is, you could spend $100 on a commercial accounting program for one copy, or you could spend $100 on GNUCash and have unlimited copies, plus way better support (you get to talk to the developers themselves, they actually listen to your feature requests, etc). Which would you rather have?

      Most folks can't hack code. And even if they can, most projects have enough coders (remember what they say about too many cooks). However, the remaining 99.99% of the population can easily help by simply donating money. Not code. It's ok that you can't code. In fact, they'd rather you didn't. OSS projects need m-o-n-e-y.

    • Re:Wish I could code... (Score:5, Informative)

      by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:56PM (#6671012)
      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.

      I agree it's a great package, and I love it- but there are several things which REALLY irk me.

      • You CANNOT select multiple entries and sort them into one category at once. I could reconcile 6 months of activity in a few minutes if I could quickly slip down the list, clicking on all the gas station entries, and then on the last one, select "Auto:Gas". Navigating the expense listing is REALLY tedious, so there should be ways to reduce the # of times you have to use it!
      • No support for auto-sorting items into categories. Quicken sorta 'fuzzy matches' imported QIF entries and the like. Ie, "Mobil station 1325325", if you've picked "Auto:Gas", will default in the import to, well, Auto:Gas :-) This is an ENORMOUS timesaver- and should at least be an option.
      • No balance forecasting.
      • Moronic defaults for the graphs(like the size, etc. Nothing displays right.) Should default to the size of the window, or a global pref. Not just "300x300" or whatever it is.
      • Building it from source is virtually impossible, like most Gnome apps- it's a maze of dependencies that makes your head spin trying to get them all satisified. It has the most dependencies of any program I've ever seen, save Request Tracker(but at least RT's dependencies are perl modules, and MOST of that can be handled by CPAN- thank god, because you can end up needing over FIFTY perl modules for RT!) I REALLY want to be using the latest Gnucash, but there are no Mandrake packages, and I don't want to waste 5 hours of my life trying to compile it :-)

      Don't get me wrong- I DO love the program, but sometimes(mostly when reconciling), I want to scream after modifying 100+ entries into various categories...arrrrg :-)

      Often times packages like these develop cool little "better than the commercial package" features. Gnucash, unfortunately, don't really surpass(or even come close) to quicken's functionality set.

      Now, what I DO like:

      • Customization of the graphs is great. As is the HTML-like nature of them, where you can click on a wedge of a pie, and 'dive into' that section. Cool beans. The graphs are simple, but just look really nice- very clean appearance thanks to the gnome antialiasing libs. They're certainly presentation/executive material.
      • Mandatory full backups. Every time you save, it writes a new copy of the file, dated, by default. This is actually a godsend- disk space is cheap, and even with 3 years worth of records the file isn't very big. But having snapshots is great in case I find out I was fucking things up for the last two weeks.
      • It handles QIF, OBEX, etc with no sweat. Two bank's QIFs have imported with no troubles.
      • Free! :)
      • No update bullshit. No "won't read your files from last year's program" bullshit. No "we sold it to you, now you can go screw" tech support. Sorry, Quicken has some of the worst release engineering and support policies, not to mention worst QA, I've ever seen. Banks are always having to help their customers through quicken problems- which is NOT where the responsibility lies. My bank actually had a "if you are trying to use quicken with your Bank Boston account..." option...

      • Re:Wish I could code... (Score:3, Informative)

        by jandrese ( 485 ) *

        Building it from source is virtually impossible, like most Gnome apps- it's a maze of dependencies that makes your head spin trying to get them all satisified. It has the most dependencies of any program I've ever seen, save Request Tracker(but at least RT's dependencies are perl modules, and MOST of that can be handled by CPAN- thank god, because you can end up needing over FIFTY perl modules for RT!) I REALLY want to be using the latest Gnucash, but there are no Mandrake packages, and I don't want to wast

        • I think they're complaining about all the dependencies for compiling the app. The majority of the installs I've done are runtime only environments. Setting up a full development environment is overkill for the vast majority of not-so-techie users.

          <rant>
          That said, my beef with GnuCash is the same as my beef with KDE apps. Tying an application to a desktop is a carry over from the Win-word that I simply do not agree with. Code to GTK or QT unless your app is an integral part of the Gnome or KDE des
          • GnuCash runs fine under a KDE desktop, a TWM desktop, or any desktop you care to name provided you've got the right libraries installed. I really wish people would put this hoary old chestnut away.

            The reason why we used the GNOME libraries is that they provide a bunch of stuff that otherwise would have to be recoded by the developers. Is that so hard to grasp? I am befuddled why anyone would develop Un*x end-user apps without taking advantage of the facilities that GNOME or KDE provide.

    • Re:Wish I could code... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Isomer ( 48061 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @08:02PM (#6671463) Homepage
      Programmers are ALWAYS wanting help, usually *especially* non programming help. Some easy (and obvious) ways a non technical user can help:
      • Documentation! Documentation! Documentation!

        Writing documents on how to do things (or why to do things, accounting is a black art to many). Help people out using the program. The article said that the programmers are spending a lot of their time answering questions instead of actually getting on and *doing* the job. Even simple things like "Tips and tricks" are a good start.

      • Testing

        Programmers make awful testers. Non programmers seem to be able to break programs in new and mysterious ways. The trick here is to learn how to give the best information to the programmers about how to reproduce bugs. A Programmer will usually only be able to fix a bug they can see, if you can't make the programmer see your bug, it won't get fixed!

      • System Administration

        If you aren't a programmer, but know Unix well, then you can offer to help manage the site, the article mentions that they are having trouble searching the archives, perhaps setting up a web based archive + htdig or similar would help.

      • Advocacy

        You usually get developers because they use software and have an itch to scratch. I'd guess that GNU/Cash's biggest problem is that programmers don't use the software. Running Tutorials, presentations at local LUGs can be invaluable for getting a larger userbase (and therefore hopefully a larger developer base)

      • Money

        If theres a feature you need (or want) or a bug you need fixed, consider putting a bounty on it. It doesn't have to be much, $10 or so. If enough people put enough bounty on one bug someone's going to bite, or a programmer can do lots of "simple" fixes/features and can make quite a few lots of $10 quickly.

      • Feedback

        Providing feedback on what features are used, and what aren't is important to developers who may spend a lot of time on a feature they think is important instead of a feature that actually is important.

      • Wiki

        If they are going to put the wiki up, go and define terms, and write pages about things. Write answers to FAQ's. Wiki'ing is very addictive and fun. And while you're at it, everyone learns! I run a wiki [wlug.org.nz], we have over 6,000 pages. It's a lot of fun.

  • Obviously what they need most is... (Score:4, Funny)

    by siskbc ( 598067 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:27PM (#6670763) Homepage
    ...a decent web server.

  • Greetings, Developer... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:27PM (#6670766)
    "You have been recruited by the GNU League to defend the frontier against Gates and the Quicken armada..."

  • was it ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by middle ( 628908 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:27PM (#6670767)
    GNUCash calls for help ?

    or GNU calls cash help ?

  • I tried it... Couldn't use it (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cvd6262 ( 180823 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:30PM (#6670790)
    I tried to get my wife to use it. She was taking a personal finance class that required Quicken. I thought we could give GnuCash a try and maybe save some dough/impress the teacher.

    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.

    Anyway, we spent a few hours on it, but eventually just forked over the dough for Quicken and rebooted into Windows.

    I'm not wishing death to GnuCash, but it is in need of huge improvements to be up their with the other accounting (personal and otherwise) that I've seen.

    • Re:I tried it... Couldn't use it (Score:5, Informative)

      by CoughDropAddict ( 40792 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:57PM (#6671021) Homepage
      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.

  • Lighter alternative (Score:4, Informative)

    by the_bahua ( 411625 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:31PM (#6670795) Homepage Journal
    ...in brinance [freshmeat.net] a command-line driven ledger app. I like it. Have a look.

  • Someone quickly throw up a domain to siphon off money that SCO is going to be seeking from someone, for something, somewhere down the line.

  • GNUCash would be great if.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ErisCalmsme ( 212887 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:34PM (#6670829) Homepage Journal
    If only it worked with Gnome 2? I mean honestly, even after installing Gnome 1.4 in hopes of being able to use GNUCash, I got it to run only to notice that there was no text, anywhere. None. Maybe thats a problem that only I'm lucky enough to have, but I'm sure if it didnt take so much to use it, more people would. It seems silly to have to install an entire (or at least most of) an old version of a "complete desktop environment" just to run one app.

  • Important, but not sexy perhaps? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by HidingMyName ( 669183 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:34PM (#6670831)
    I would really like a high quality well accepted Linux/Unix based accounting package. However, most programmers I know don't find writing accounting packages "fun", so they don't work on them except at gunpoint (or for a paycheck).

    Thus, I think the ideal solution would be for the project team to generate revenue, either by support or find a paying customer (who would allow release of the source). Suppose they wrote a book and released a free CD of the source code with it? Would that generate enough royalties? This may be hard in the current economic climate, but I think it would give them their best chances. Would vendors who are making big Linux pushes be interested? Have the project leaders directly solicited input (and contributions) from these vendors (e.g. IBM)?

  • Other projects that need help. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There are other projects that need help, to succeed they need all the help they can get. Heres just a small list of desperate projects.

    1) Mozilla, one of the largest projects in open source, bigger than KDE and Xfree86 combined.
    2) GNOME, the popular desktop. It needs more help in polishing its rough spots and needs features.
    3) XFree86, this thing needs a lot of help in cleaning up its messy codebase.
    4) Konqueror. The web browser partially developed by Apple for KDE. Its getting good at rendering websites b

  • Gnucash is dependency HELL (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ksw2 ( 520093 ) <<obeyeater> <at> <gmail.com>> on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:37PM (#6670859) Homepage
    I love the software. I *don't* love spending an hour or more every time I need it to run on a new distribution, thanks to the assload of picky dependencies.

    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

    • Yep.

      nova root # emerge -p gnucash

      These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

      Calculating dependencies ...done!
      [ebuild N ] gnome-base/libghttp-1.0.9-r3
      [ebuild N ] gnome-base/gnome-print-0.35-r3
      [ebuild U ] gnome-extra/gal-0.24 [1.99.7]
      [ebuild N ] dev-libs/slib-2.4.3
      [ebuild N ] dev-libs/g-wrap-1.3.4
      [ebuild N ] gnome-base/bonobo-1.0.22
      [ebuild N ] gnome-extra/gtkhtml-1.1.10
      [ebuild N ] dev-lang/swig-1.3.10-r2
      [ebuild N ] gnome-extra/guppi-0.40.3-r2
      [ebuild U ] dev-util/guile-1.6.4 [1.4.1]
      [ebuild N ]

  • quarter million lines of code? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by codepunk ( 167897 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:38PM (#6670879)
    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.

    • Mod parent up! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Micah ( 278 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @07:07PM (#6671115) Homepage Journal
      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.

      • Re:Mod parent up! (Score:3, Informative)

        by Zach Garner ( 74342 )

        Seriously, can anyone name ONE SINGLE advantage that C (or even C++) has over Python for this type of app?

        Sure, at the time it started, more developers were doing C, GUI's were written in C, and so were many of the libraries they wanted to use. Another advantage is that the primary gnucash developers were familiar with it.

        And by the way, they use Scheme for *a lot* of the programming via guile. You can google for a little article by Prof. Novig comparing Python and Lisp (short version: Python gives you

  • It's too hard to compile (Score:5, Informative)

    by SnarfQuest ( 469614 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:39PM (#6670882)
    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.
    • This is also my biggest gripe about GnuCash. I tried building it a year or more ago (probably a few years ago, actually), and there were just SO many dependencies that it became a huge cluster to try to get working.

      Now, don't get me wrong, I like building stuff from source as much as the next Slashdotter, but these guys just use way too many external libraries.

      There current "Software Requirements" [gnucash.org] page lists these dependencies (some or all of which may be required):

      • Gtk+, Gnome, Glade -- I have no
      • You're complaining they use libraries for HTTP and XML? I say "good on them". Libraries are a way of pooling resources. If you use libraries instead of rolling your own, you get

        1. More testing
        2. More bugs fixed, more correct implementation
        3. More features
        4. More programmers who understand your HTTP/XML/whatever code

      • Yes, it does... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Goonie ( 8651 ) * <<gro.arbmaneb> <ta> <lekrem.trebor>> on Monday August 11, 2003 @08:41PM (#6671684) Homepage
        First, I should add that whilst I was a GnuCash developer for a time, I have not been actively involved for nearly two years (though seeing the call to arms it might be time to roll up the sleeves againn. But there are very good reasons why GnuCash made some of the design decisions you mentioned:
        GtkHTML -- do you really need a HTML parser in an accounting program?Why not just use Mozilla to display your HTML?

        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.

        Gnome XML No one NEEDS to save their accounting data in some XML file format? What's wrong with the standard Quicken format that everyone is used to or even a nice, simple text file that I can munge with vi?

        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?

    • I get the impression that a LOT of the Gn* programs have this problem to one extent or the other. "Unfortunately", a lot of 'regular' users never see this, because the get pre-compiled (and generally unoptimized) packages and never know that the person who put the packages together had to go out and track down a plethora of obscure libraries, and then update a few of the other obscure libraries to a newer version because the build complained.

      I'm 'nerdly' enough that I like to compile a lot of my system fr

      • ahem, I just installed gnucash, it was difficult,

        open synaptic

        click update lists (not needed, but hey it's a habit).

        click applications/productivity
        select gnucash and postgresql backend, click install on each

        click the do it button

        done.

        that was the "user friendly way"

        I could have used the nasty command line everybody says is hard:

        apt-get install gnucash
        As you command master, do you want me to orally pleasure you 81mb times as well? *sigh* if you must
        done.

    • Re:It's too hard to compile (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Skjellifetti ( 561341 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @09:38PM (#6671954) Journal
      I gave up on trying to use GnuCash long ago due to the impossibility of compiling it, and getting it to run.

      Yes. I am an economist turned coder. I understand investment theory and accounting, I've been building enterprise software for the past decade, and I have been looking for a finance/accounting project to hack on in order to add support for high-end investment management problems. GNU/Cash seemed ideal until I tried to build it. Bah! These guys don't seem to have any real experience with software design of medium sized systems.

      GC needs to broken up into smaller pieces that can be independently studied and built with limited dependencies on external packages. I should be able to build a command line accounting system using a base set of transaction libraries without needing to have much else installed except the libs and precompiler for my chosen backend database. Same for reports. They should need only the db support libs and an XML lib for parsing XML defined reports. Everything else is just GUI convenience or eye candy.

  • I'm not sure that a better solution wouldn't be to implement all of the checkbook functions in GnuCash in GnuE [gnue.org]. It seems like a more flexible framework for doing this kind of stuff. Plus it provides an architecture that a user can move up the 'business ladder' to eventually become enterprise size.

    Now, mind you, I'm not volunteering - I have enough free software work right now. And, I'm still happily using GnuCash - but I still think it's a good idea :)

    I heard a rumor that the GnuCash and GnuE folk

  • Asking /. readers for help... (Score:5, Funny)

    by cliffy2000 ( 185461 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @06:44PM (#6670926) Journal
    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.

  • GnuCash (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cookiepus ( 154655 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @07:04PM (#6671086) Homepage
    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.

    Some months ago I said on /. 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.

    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.

  • Documentation, documentation, documentation! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @07:18PM (#6671186) Journal
    This fits into my pet theory of successful open-source projects rather nicely; every single flaw except one boils down to a lack of documentation.

    "Work on the developer documentation problem" - obvious

    "Fix core capabilities in the engine" - the exception, though one could stretch and observe that a lot of the problem is probably that nobody has a clue what is broken due to lack of documentation.

    "Improve interoperability with other software or new modules" - fundamentally, the fact it was "non-interoperable" in the first place boils down to a lack of documentation, because why bother adding hooks to anything if nobody can figure out how to use them in less then a year? Adding hooks is easy, relatively speaking, and the payback is huge; the only reason to not do it is if you realize nobody could possibly use them if you added them.

    "Make sure the mailing lists are easily searchable" - obvious

    "Get more people write access to the website" - obvious

    "Quickly implement a Wiki or similar system" - obvious

    "Spend less time answering some types of questions" - they should be able to point people at a FAQ, a common type of documentation

    If it isn't documented, it doesn't exist. GnuCash's problem is an excess of non-existence, which is rather odd considering how many lines of code it has.

    It is so much easier to start the documentation in the first place, and keep it up, then to get to 250,000 LOC and just then try to start. Sometimes clever coders can actually be a liability to a project, because they can plow on where lesser men and women would have needed to pause, document, possibly re-organize, and simplify.

    my $s = 'DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS';

    $s =~ s/DEVELOPERS/DOCUMENT IT/g;

    • Jerf... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Goonie ( 8651 ) *
      Please go and have a look at the GnuCash codebase before slagging the developers off.

      It is not perfect, and maintaining documentation is hard work, but compared to many other projects the GnuCash codebase is extremely clean and relatively well documented, unless it's deteriorated horribly since I last looked which I doubt.

      GnuCash's user documentation has always been pretty good, though I may be biased because I had a major hand in writing the docs in 1.6. The big problem with documenting GnuCash is that


  • I don't mean for this to be a troll, but, really, Linux is never going to have applications for end users under the open source model if the applications being developed are not glamorous in some way.

    GNUCash... what's that? What's sexy about accounting?

    You aren't going to get people to work on that unless you pay them, or, they want to write their own business rules engine. So, either finish GNUCash on your own, or, someone else will step up to the plate with a better, more elegant model.

    Throwing more bodies at a problem is a Microsoft approach and the whole idea behind oss is that hopefully someone will step up to the plate with that really radical idea that simplifies everything and gets you from 250k lines of crap to maybe 50-100k lines of sane code.

    One of these days I'll learn to not post when I haven't had a beer...

  • It makes sense / it makes no sense (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Klync ( 152475 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @08:05PM (#6671480)
    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.

    Enough of the bitching from the /. 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.

    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.

  • Umm... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Steve G Swine ( 49788 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @08:07PM (#6671490) Journal
    If I want to deal with a quarter million lines of dependecy-laden code that the original developers can't make serve the purpose... I just go to the office.

    Pass.

    (Or is it a quarter billion LOC? I can't tell the difference anymore either...)

    Good luck, though. After you turn it around, be sure and drop us a note saying how, k?

  • Windows version needed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mustang Matt ( 133426 ) on Monday August 11, 2003 @10:07PM (#6672108)
    I know no one wants to hear it, but I personally think this app is dying to be ported. I mean apache and mysql are and they're both huge successes.

    Would this be the first open source windows accounting package?

  • One thing that scares me.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by plazman30 ( 531348 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:33AM (#6674533) Homepage

    Well, we have GnuCash here that is in danger here and it has no way of exporting your data. Now there is a scary thought.

    One thing I have to say is that the most important feature for me in a financial app is cross platform use. Because of that, I chose to spend money on Moneydance [moneydance.com]. It's written in Java and has great support. I run it on my Mac at home on both my Windows and Linux partitions on my laptop.

    If you prefer to go the free software route, there is jGnash [sf.net], whch will also run on various OSes, becuase it's also written in Java.

    GnuCash is good product, but it has way too many dependancies and relies way to heavily on Gnome. Because of that, it can't be ported to Windows of MacOS X, even though there are native GTK libraries for both those environments. Perhaps the GnuCash team should focus on making a really good accounting engine and allow others to wrap GUIs of any kind around them.

    A personal financial app is very important to the Linux desktop. I think it's far too important for the application to be in jeapordy of disappearing. Perhaps someone like Ximian should add this to their list of software, or the FSF should turn around and get some people coding full time on this with a grant.

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