Revision as of 18:02, 25 December 2010

This list represents is a rough list of ideas that some of the core developers have discussed over the years as the likely next directions for GnuCash. That sentence is mightily-qualified as it should be; this list should not be interpreted as a promise or even really "official"... while it's a good guess as to what one group of people would like to do, projects like GnuCash are the results of a wide group of contributors, and they ultimately decide what road GnuCash travels.

Register rewrite

The current register is optimized for visual similarity to a "checkbook register" at the expense of simplicity and maintainability. It's also written at too low a level, in large part because it was written early in Gtk+-2's lifecycle when the appropriate layout widgets weren't available.

Eliminate deprecated widgets and libraries

Gnucash still uses several gtk and gnome widgets that have been marked as deprecated. An effort is underway to eliminate most of these in the 2.2 release. There is one deprecated widget that can't be removed in that time frame because gtk is missing the equivalent functionality.

Several of the Gnome libraries upon which Gnucash now depends (libart_lgpl, libbonobo, libbonoboui, libglade, libgnome, libgnomecanvas, libgnomeprint, libgnomeprintui, libgnomeui, and libgnomevfs) have been deprecated for several years now, and will be removed from Gnome3, scheduled for release in January 2011. While most distributions will continue to support Gnome 2 for awhile, we'll need to migrate to the newer replacements soon.

In order to continue to provide backward compatbility, this may mean that we have to emulate Gtk+ and have two development branches, one for Gnome 2 and one for Gnome 3.

New database backend

The current PostGres database backend doesn't have feature parity with GnuCash, and is relatively inflexible to extend. Most of GnuCash is based in the Query Object Framework, and should be integrated closer to there to implement a database backend.

Once done, a database backend should replace the XML file backend as the primary backend for GnuCash, likely using SQLite as the implementation.

Generic importer

TSV/CSV importing "simply" needs a dialog to do column-semantics mapping.

Scheme minimization

There are some parts of GnuCash that make a round-trip into scheme code for no really good reason.

"Invert" reports

Right now reports are scheme scripts that programatically generate HTML. They should instead -- at least for HTML generation -- be HTML templates that embed scheme fragments to control looping and variable output.

Remove module system

The current module system confuses runtime-loaded modules with shared libraries. As well, it is (arguably) at the wrong level of granularity in places, leading to too many modules.

Better MVC split

There is too much application logic in the user-interface handling code. It should move out into some not-yet-fully-defined model layer.