GnuCash 1.9.0 Released

Grendel Drago writes "The GnuCash team have released GnuCash 1.9.0. After literally years of waiting, GnuCash is now a GTK2 application. The current version is unstable, and testers are needed."

GNUCash Ported Elsewhere?

[Pentrant]

I've been using GNUCash on Linux for awhile, and have wanted to also use it on Windows, as I've found it to be better than Quicken and the like. I looked for a Windows port, but the only thing I found were some messages saying something to the effect of "Wait until it's on GTK2."

With this news, it looks like a port might finally be reachable. This may be the next great OSS app that I can show off to friends and family, and I'll be able to use it on my Windows laptop. Here's to the GNUCash team for all their hard work!

Re:Not a M$ Windos fan but.....

[brxndxn]

I bought Quicken Deluxe 2006. And, I started entering in a bunch of data. I found a flaw where if you enter data quickly by tabbing through the boxes, it will eliminate the categories you need for reporting taxes..

I spent about 2 hours talking to an Indian guy over chat who barely spoke English who could not help me. He switched me over to a hispanic girl who spoke even less English at me for another 3 hours. Seriously.. both spoke horrible English. About three-fourths of my effort went to trying to communicate with them. Also, they knew shit about Quicken. It was easy to tell I knew more about it than them - just they were there as 'support' for idiots only or something.

Then, I called in the next day and spoke with person after person for another three hours. Each time, I had to duplicate the problem on my end, reinstall Quicken, duplicate the problem again.. and show them how to duplicate it. They duplicated it and still could not tell me how to fix it. They said they will send it to the development team. That was a month ago.. Hopefully they can fix this before tax season.

Whereas, in open source, if there was a problem like this, I could probby get one of the developers to issue a minor quickfix in a matter of days..

Hopefully there's a way to convert all my current data (about 50 hours of entry worth) into GnuCash's format. I'm definitely willing to give it a try..

The Kot

[msbsod]

Here is a little example from the Gnucash source code:

char *
libgncmod_tax_us_LTX_gnc_module_path(void) {
#ifdef LOCALE_SPECIFIC_TAX
const char *thislocale = setlocale(LC_ALL, NULL);
if (strncmp(thislocale, "de_DE", 5) == 0)
return g_strdup("gnucash/tax/de_DE");
else
#endif
return g_strdup("gnucash/tax/us");
}

In plain English, this means if you know only your little backyard, then there is just US. Otherwise your world may include Germany, and the rest is, of course, US. Now, some people may find this funny. Others might cry. I am just confused. How can they write such code? It should read if Germany ... else if US ... else if ... else UNKNOWN, STOP! (or use perhaps a switch/case/default statement).

The last time I put numbers like the shown 5 into code was almost three decades ago in a Basic program. I have seen much better GNU software and hope someone removes the word GNU from this project's name.

No offense, but I thought financial planning software should comply with higher standards.

Re:Just what I needed

[Nutria]

If the word was French, (I think) that would be the correct word. Since it's Italian, it's capice.

My Dad loved to use that word when he was yelling at me. It took me years to verify that he meant "understand".

Not happy with any of them

[chriguhose]

I've been into Personal Finance Manager appliction for a while. Just for fun, because now that i actually make money i would like to manage my accounts in a proper way. Unfortunatly i've found that not to be easy at all.

Tried with:
GnuCash
Quicken
and now with MS Money

None of them really do what i want.

GnuCash had double entry accounting which i think is just much to manage for my personal finances. Support to import transaction was incomplete back then (only QIF format worked, and QIF is a PoS). Now it seems that they improved on that but still the double entry system makes me nervous.
Quicken is a buggy, ad invested piece of software. Whenever you click on a "function" you're send to some third party website. Their move to not allow import of QIF for certain types of accounts gave me the rest and i quit.
Money is not as ad invested, but buggy as well. But right know i still kinda like it, except that some general functionalities are missing that i really would like to see in the future.

What's missing in all of these PFM's is that they don't take stupid work away from me, they should help me, not give me more work than necessary.
Example: My Payee information that i download in the transactions of the banks looks like encrypted bullocks to me. There has to be a way to name these things in user friendly way.
The automatic categorization of transaction lacks functionality as well. It should be possible to define rules. Like: i went to Safeway at noon on a weekday -> Lunch Category, otherwise Groceries
Furthermore i like to have the whole thing setup as a service on my computer, it wouldn't take too much... The service would then automatically log into my bank accounts everyday and download latest transactions. Maybe even sent me an e-mail or text message that i should maybe not use credit card XYZ anymore, because i'm about to bounce the credit limit.
There is more and i just wish i could see any sort of progress in their yearly releases, but i've given up on that.

Re:Years of waiting...

[jayloden]

Ever try compiling it, particularly on Slackware? I liked GnuCash when i tried it last, but trying to install it can be a real pain in the ass if you dont have a package for it available. Converting it to GTK in this instance was more than a cosmetic change, it was probably to get away from Gnucash's heavy dependencies on legacy libs and make future code changes more portable.

Re:GNUCash Ported Elsewhere?

[wik]

>I'm not sure how many extraneous libraries GnuCash 1.9 relies on...

If it's anything like the 1.8 version, it relies on at piles of esoteric packages [gnucash.org]. Why this program has significant portions written in scheme (of all things!), I will never understand.

I use the program, but it requires extraordinary care and maintenance. There was an issue with debian package dependencies sometime last year which completely broke gnucash for weeks. It's simply poor software design. Now I run it within a vmware player image which never gets updated, so I can be sure that it'll start tomorrow.

Re:GNUCash Ported Elsewhere?

[jsled]

wik, the GnuCash developers agree. We've been focusing very intentionally and narrowly on getting the gtk/gnome2 port out the door w/o many other changes to minimize risk, but once this release is out, I think you'll see some large simplifciations of the codebase.

Web Version

[alohatiger]

Quickbooks Pro has a web based version that's pretty nice. Pros: great tech support. Cons: $25/month and only works in internet explorer.

I would pay a monthly fee for a standards compliant web based version of Quicken.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Mac binaries?

[mh101]

I wonder if they or someone else will release Mac binaries finally?

Yes, I know you can install GnuCash using Fink, as that's what I do currently. But it would be so much more convenient to be able to download a standalone GnuCash.app like you can with Gimp, Frozen Bubble, OpenOffice, AbiWord, and others.

Donating to the Gnucash project

[jroysdon]

I've been using Gnucash for close to two years now. It was the final step to me ditching my Windows install, since I was using Quicken before.

Gnucash isn't perfect, but it's got everything I need to keep track of things. I do all my entry manually, although I have imported a few times just testing (I prefer my own formatting and such and don't care which gas station, etc., just that it was a gas station).

I figure if I'd been upgrading Quicken versions, I'd have spent at least $50. Plus, I would like be able to link to a Windows port on my Free GPL Programs [roysdon.net] page which I list all the apps I use that others should check out on Windows.

I decided to donate [sourceforge.net] to the cause. Hopefully others who use Gnucash will consider tipping the developers [sourceforge.net]. I'm sure even $5, especially if it's dozens of folks, will help motivate them.

I wish I had the time to bug-test v1.9, but I don't, so I'll tip a little more ;-)'

Re:KMyMoney

[k.a.f.]

Good point. A well-written money management app would implement its own widget toolkit, graphing engine, database backend, network stack, C library, and floating point handler. After all, why leverage the work of thousands of others when you can re-write it all, poorly, yourself?

You have something of a point -- but when the developers themselves [gnucash.org] explicitly use words like "nightmare" and "even with apt-get, some packages may still need to be installed manually", re-use has definitely been taken too far.

Suitable for Europe?

[KevinColyer]

I am searching for a replacement package for our small charity in Brussels. My main concern is that the authorities here have quite clear guidelines for reporting our finances - they dictate account codes for example. To do quaterly VAT returns we need to know some precise details for some precise forms.

My question is are the FLOSS accounting packages up to this. Can the/have they been customised for the accounting systems here in Europe?

Any ideas/help please!

Re:Ever heard of a static compile?

[jsled]

Well, there's both maintainability and feature reasons to move to gtk2 (and, generally, modern libraries), as well. It does require non-trivial changes; "optional" gtk1 and gtk2 front-ends would be a massive undertaking that no one has helped do.

While the overall dependecy profile of gnucash is large, it's really not that large; but it certainly sits very high up on the desktop application stack, so there's a lot of depth below it. In any case, the dependencies are there for two reasons: it's a comparatively featureful app as well as ... over-engineered. I'd rather reduce some of the dependencies through simplificiation of the code base.

In any case, static linking binaries is generally silly.