Re: Questions and comments

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Mon, Apr 05, 2004 at 06:35:27PM -0700, Jerry wrote:
> As a Redhat 7.x user , by choice, and a need to use Gnumeric, I found
> some of the financial functions I needed were missing. Went to the
> Gnumeric web and found that the latest and greatest 1.1.6

The latest stable release is 1.2.8.  If you intend to do any
charting you'll want to update.  There are also numerous stability
improvements.  1.1.x was a _development_ series, and 1.1.6 was
fairly early in the cycle.  I would not reccomend it for production
use.

> had the
> functions I needed  cumipmt & cumprinc, but that wont run without
> Gnome2 and many other upgrades.

That is true.  However, it's not as bad as it seems.  gnome2 is much
tidier about dependencies, and significantly easier to build.  You
may want to look at some of the available build scripts such as
garnome, or jhbuild.  That can do all the necessary work.

> I downloaded the 1.1.6 src and took
> a look at the functions I wanted, since they should be changes to
> internal calculations and not GUI stuff.I patched in what I thought
> was needed and compiled with debug enabled. Cumipmt function now shows
> "value #" insted of "unimplimented", step in the right direction.
That may work.  There were a few changes in the way functions are
declared (to provide more status information), but nothing massive.
The interfaces should be pretty much unchanged.  You're playing with
fire, but it has a chance.

> I tried to set breakpoints under GDB and see whats happening.
> When I run Gnumeric under GDB the breakpoints don't trigger and
> the GDB prompt doesn't return, until Gnumeric is exited? What
> am I missing?

Hmm, in 1.0.x the functions were still in the core (in 1.2.x they
are in plugins) so there's no worries about a breakpoitn in code
that has not yet been loaded.  I'm guessing that the #VALUE is being
produced by the argument marshaller, if you pass something invalid
to an argument the marshaller catches it before it even gets to the
routine.

> Maybe someone with more programming talent could impliment the new
> functions back into the old world, as they really are internal, and
> I'm not the only one out here, that isn't running a current development
> system.

I'd hope that gnome2 is no longer considered cutting edge by any
stretch of the imagination.  It should be available on all platforms
by now, and offers significant improvements.
 
> For those of you thinking of persuing compiles of 1.0.x versions,
> beware that I had to load development rpms for all needed libraries,
> or it just wouldn't compile.

Early versions of Gnumeric were used as a testing ground for the
gnome libraries, it used alot of them.  More modern versions are
intentionall stepping back from that bleeding edge for stable
releases to make things easier.

Good Luck