Re: GnuCash page on GO site

On Thu, 2004-02-26 at 09:31 -0600, Linas Vepstas wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 02:06:34PM +0000, Charles Goodwin was heard to remark:
> > On Thu, 2004-02-26 at 05:13, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> > > My gut feel is that libgda offers the wrong abstractions. 
> > > Although gnucash data can be (is) represented as SQL, that's 
> > > the wrong place to work.  There's a lot of pulling things together
> > > that must happen before the data is reportable.  For example,
> > > computing account balances can be quite complicated; its not a
> > > simple sql query or a simple table lookup.
> > 
> > Call me stupid but isn't libgda a data abstraction layer?  Does the data
> > initially have to be SQL or can it not be some arbitrary format which
> > libgda supports?  Could this be as easy as adding GnuCash-data-support
> > to libgda?
> 
> ? Not last time I looked. I argued this with rodrigo and many others
> over the last 3-4 years, and I went off and created dwi out of
> frustration.
>
I believe you argued 3-4 years ago, and that's all. I haven't seen any
post from you in the last 1-2 years (if not more), when the move to a
better abstraction layer was done, including many comments from many
people, probably including some of your comments.

>   treshna created bond out of frustration,
>
bond was going to be using libgda last time I looked :-) We even planned
(Andrew (bond's author) and myself) to integrate it into libgda/
libgnomedb, along with his report tool (papyrus). Lack of time has
prevented this from happening.

>  and I think the
> gnue guys went thier own way too.
>
yes, that was 4-5 years ago. There were disagreements over the license,
which was LGPL and gnue people wanted GPL. That was the disagreement
that broke the realtionship, not a technical one.

>  For the gnucash engine, we implemented
> 'qof' to solve that need.  Actually, qof is older than gnomedb, 
> Derek's re-write of qof is now the 3rd rewrite of the query engine.  
> I don't think libgda even *has* a query engine.  
> 
what do you mean by a 'query engine'?

> I'm looking at the libgda docs, but if they have data abstraction,
> then I can't see it documented anywhere.
> 
> In my most recent adventure, I was intellectually contemplating
> gluing the gnucash qof to the bottom of SQLLite.  sqllite does
> support a limited amount of abstraction, I think they even have 
> some sample code showing how to use sql to get the free disk space 
> and cpu temperature.   I thought that would be pretty cool.
> 
> Derek, I'm not sure I ever mentioned/explained this: *if* we 
> glue gnucash objects to the *bottom* of sqllite, then we can use
> standard SQL queries to get data out of them.  Then people like
> libgda and gnomedb and other report systems could sit on top of 
> the sqllite api, and do whatever they need to do.  Yes, this is 
> very hypothetical right now, and there are some dangerous 
> unexplored issues.  It wasn't something I'd wanted to do soon,
> just maybe someday.
> 
ugh, is that the abstraction you are looking for? I thought the cool
thing was to hide SQL in the API, wasn't it?

cheers