[omaha] GnuCash and others

[Jeff Rush]

By coincidence I've just started evaluating GnuCash this week, to replace a
homegrown system I wrote in Zope years ago and no longer have time to maintain.

Jeff Hinrichs - DM&T wrote:
> 
> After trying out all 3 I decided to go with gnuCash and it has been
> acceptable to a point.  To clarify, gnuCash is solid and a decent
> replacement for quick or money but it has a few blemishes in my
> estimation.  1) It is written in C++/Guile/Scheme - fine, great
> whatever works for you. but it makes it decidedly slow in getting
> additional contributors.

Yeah, I wish it was more accessible to Python as well.  Although reading the
site, the interface to Scheme is via SWIG, so it wouldn't be too hard to
re-run SWIG on the definition files and get a Python interface.  And then
you'd have to document it for Python folks.


> 3)  Documentation for extending or adding reports is non-existent --
> they point you to a couple of example reports but that is not much
> help.  Even if you were a Guile pro it wouldn't help because there
> isn't any docs on what is available to the reporting engine.

And we need API docs to the GnuCash internals, even if we got Python hooked in.


> Now it sounds like I'm really down on gnuCash -- and I'll admit I've
> just slapped it around quite a bit  but compared to the other apps
> available, both closed and open -- gnuCash is the reigning champion.
> They do lots of things right -- there is a lot of experience with it
> and a pretty active user mail list.

One other attribute - GnuCash doesn't use a mainstream relational database but
their own b-tree format that isn't really multi-user and hence not potentially
web accessible either.  Doesn't matter for some folks.

-Jeff