Re: What can I do to help?

[Neil Jerram <neil@ossau.uklinux.net>]

>>>>> "William" == William Bland <wjb@abstractnonsense.com> writes:

[gnucash list - pls ignore quote + first paragraph]

    William> On Sat, Sep 28, 2002 at 06:19:34PM +0200, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
    >> 
    >> Don't know about the difficulty, and the actual need of such a
    >> project, but maybe a set of GUILE bindings for libxml or
    >> somesuch -- XML is becoming the standard for storing various
    >> files, and there GUILE doesn't come with any support for
    >> reading or writing it (out-of-the-box, that is).

    William> Sounds like a good idea to me.  Is anyone else working on
    William> this? (don't want to step on anyone's toes).  Does
    William> anybody have any requests/advice for how it
    William> should/shouldn't be done?

I'm pretty sure there are already two implementations of this - the
names `mixp', `guile-expat' and `Thierry Bezecourt' ring bells in my
memory, so you might like to google the web first.  ISTR that most
links for mixp are broken, but that I eventually managed to download a
copy by some semi-obvious modification of the broken URL.
(Unfortunately I don't still have a copy here.)

[gnucash list - the following is relevant]

My suggestion would be to get involved with GnuCash, if that
application area interests you, in particular facilitating the use of
Guile as an extension language for GnuCash.

GnuCash is already a tremendous application, but right now Guile is
really only used by GnuCash as an implementation language.  I think it
has the potential to become a flagship example of how users can extend
Guile-based applications for their own purposes, but currently the
hooks don't exist to allow this.  Or perhaps they do exist, but they
aren't sufficiently convenient to use in practice.

To repeat myself in another way :-) ...  If you follow the GnuCash
mailing lists, you'll see people asking questions like `how can I do
so-and-so to all transactions that such-and-such?'.  IMO, these
questions should be answerable by someone writing and contributing a
piece of Scheme code, just like Emacs Lisp libraries for Emacs.  But,
for whatever reason, this kind of activity isn't happening yet --
instead, all such requests are seen as problems for the core
developers to take on board.

I think that kickstarting this kind of activity would give a huge
boost to both GnuCash and Guile in general.

Best regards,
        Neil



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