Re: GnuCash page on GO site

[linas linas org (Linas Vepstas)]

Hi all,

> > 5/ widgets -- specifically:
> >    a/ register [or, a generic cell-range editor abstracted which a
> >       financial-account register could be built on]
> 
> My sentiments exactly; I always think of GnuCash and how it could be
> using Gnumeric-widgets whenever I'm using Gnumeric.  (Holy bejeez I

Gnucash has a profoundly different model of a 'cell-range' 
than gnumeric.  Its a huge amount of rather complex, hairy code 
to get it right. 

Many of the gnucash-specific widgets were developed after a considerable
amount of surfing of the net for other code/projects that could
be leveraged ... and none were found.  The recurring-transaction
widgets are a good example of that.  The closest might have been
evolution folks, but they were disinterested (at the time).

One thing I fear slightly about this "lets leverage other stuff"
conversation is a backsliding of features & functions.  GnuCash
has at various times gotten over-eager developers involved who
were unaware of existing function and managed to trash it while
porting to the new 'whiz-bang' interfaces.  Its not quite as 
catastrophic as a ground-up-re-write (recall the 6-year-long
netscape-to-mozilla transition), but it is similar, just 
on a smaller scale.

For example: gtk2 ctree ... is deprecated.  But the new tree
functions lack many of the features in the old tree.  I've got one
app (gnotime, ex-gtt) that has been ported to gtk2 years ago but 
uses deprecated ctree because of this.  What's worse, the deprecated
features that gnotime needs also happen to be features that the 
user-interface-guideline people think are "bad features", and so
theres this political tension: the missing features can't be added.

(To be specific: I want a ctree-type widget where I can color 
different rows different colors. But this violates the UI guidelines).

Lets just be careful not to go into this eyes-wide-shut.

--linas
 

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