Re: libgda .... Re: GnuCash page on GO site

[Josh Sled <jsled-gnomeoffice asynchronous org>]

On Sat, 2004-03-06 at 15:51, Charles Goodwin wrote:

> In the last several days you've said:
[deletia]
> - Your users are most important to you...
> - ...yet you're release process disregards your users
>   (will refer to this one later!)

That's not true, nor fair.

> As for my comments on your goals for GnuCash; they're grand and
> ambitious and admirable for that.  But when do you plan on releasing
> GnuCash?  Why not set a string of short term goals that are achievable
> whilst moving toward your long term ambitions?  Users (at least anybody
> that I've talked to about it which is a fair number of people) want a
> single-user Gnome2 version of GnuCash.  

1.8.8 has been released for a while, now.

The Gnome2 port is in active development.  An incremental "release" of
that effort -- right now -- would be pointless, since half the app
doesn't work.  At the same time, this effort does move forward, and
could use more contributors...

> A multi-user SQL-using
> super-application is not realistic before the end of this year.

There's two things GnuCash is trying to accomplish that relate to this:

1/ Ditch the XML backend with an embedded DB backend.

2/ Move the in-memory-object-graph-query setup imposed by to a SQL-query
framework.

This is as-valid for the single-user case as for the multi-user case. 
It will simplify the internal structure of GnuCash, and prevent a class
of data-storage errors, which people will not tollerate with their
financial info.

Both of these are not unreasonable before the end of the year. The
Multi-User aspect isn't really super-high prio, though the above is step
in that direction.

> than competing products.  GnuCash... is flailing, still in Gtk1 mode
> which is coming up to being 2 years off the pace.  Even when your
> release it will be untested and problems will be quickly exposed by the
> community as happens with all software.  OTOH, both AbiWord and Gnumeric
> are well tested stable applications due to constant community review.

I don't know what you're trying to get at, here, besides saying GnuCash
sucks, O'Doyale rules ...  Whatever.

For the record, when releases are approached, there has definitely been
a set of beta and RC releases, and we've found a lot of issues and
gotten a lot of feedback that way.

The problem is not that people aren't seeing the new stuff, so much as
there's hasn't been a lot of new stuff developed recently.

The short summary is this: Yes, it's been flailing.  GnuCash has
suffered from a lot in the last couple of years.  Major contributors
have walked away from the project for a variety of reasons, sometimes
leaving stuff half-implemented.  Most everyone has had real-{life,job}
intervene.  I've left scheduled transactions broken in a couple of very
serious ways for the last year, being swamped by a startup, and am just
now finding the time to get them fixed up.

At the same time, there are some issues with the codebase that need to
be cleaned up to make the project simpler and more approachable, to get
a large developer community. Those will come in time, as well.

Multiple parties [myself included] have gotten re-engaged in the past
three weeks; I hope the momentum will continue.

I hope you all resolve your spat ... there's too much work to get done.

...jsled

-- 
http://www.asynchronous.org/ - `a=jsled; b=asynchronous.org; echo ${a} ${b}`
# A: Because it breaks the flow of normal conversation.
# Q: Why don't we put the response before the request?