It's been rumoured that Alexandru Harsanyi said:
>
> > What draws programmers to other projects? What repels them from
> > Gnucash?
>
> I can't tell you what other programers think of GnuCash, but I can tell
> you my opinion about the problem: Gnucash tries to use every possible
> feature in program developping.
This is an accident which somehow slowly overcame the project, and it does
concern me. I do indeed fear that it is driving programmers away, yet
it is unclear as to what to do about it.
> GnuCash has now 3 GUI's, none of which is complete, Motif, the most
> complete one is deprecated, from what I understand. IMHO you should decide
> upon a GUI, and concentrate your efforts on that one. You should erase the
> other GUI's from the source directories. Later, when that GUI is *finised*
> (not just stable or functional) you can begin working on other GUI's as
> well.
This is a symptom of the current open-source environment. E.G. Someone sends
Qt/kde patches. How should one respond? "go away, we're focusing on one gui"?
Or should one accept the patches? The road to hell is paved with good
intentions ...
> One other problem with GnuCash is that it uses two extension languages,
> each language having it's partisans :) . One might say that you can write
> exensions in the language of your choice,
That was the hope ...
> but the truth is you must
> consult both perl and scheme files to write extensions, that is, you must
> know *both* languages.
This has become the reality ...
I had hoped that the use of perl in the HTML portions of the code (e.g.
the "reports") would attract web-page designers who were already fluent in perl.
So far, this has not bourn fruit. There are in fact good technical
reasons to abandon perl, the primary one being that I don't know of any
way of running it within the address space of the main process. Unless
someone steps up and gets pro-active with the perl pages & perl suport,
they will likely get re-written in scheme.
> The third problem with Gnucash is that all of you guys rush into adding
> new features before finising the coding of previous ones. For example the
> gnucash engine was developped up to a point, declared good enough and you
> moved on. It still has "hack allert" comments but no one's working on
> them.
This is a symptom of unpaid, volunteer work. People do what they want to
do, what they feel like working on. I don't know that that can be changed.
There are many requests for this or that feature that cross this mailing
list. I personally am not going to code any of them unless I have some
reason/urge/desire to do so. Life is too short. I would rather see
someone else do these, someone who does have the desire, knowledge and
inclination.
> with my master thesis... Now that the thesis is almost finished I think of
> involwing myself a little in the developping. I hope I will be able to
> help you guys with something...
And I appreciate the help that you've already provided; at least one of the
features was directly inspired by one of your patches.
--linas
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