gnucash/README

###########################################################################
                       DEVELOPMENT  RELEASE

The version 1.3.x series of GnuCash are experimental development
releases.  They may or may not work. Use at your own risk.

The last stable, production version was gnucash-1.2.5.
The next stable, production version will be gnucash-1.4.x

###########################################################################

Table of Contents:

  - Overview
  - Upgrading from 1.2.x
  - Dependencies
  - Invocation/running
  - Internationalization
  - Building and Installing
  - Supported OSes
  - Additional Download Sites
  - Getting the Source via CVS
  - Developing GnuCash

========
Overview
--------

GnuCash is a personal finance manager.  A check-book like 
register GUI allows you to enter and track bank accounts,
stocks, income and even currency trades.  The interface is 
designed to be simple and easy to use, but is backed with 
double-entry accounting principles to ensure balanced books.

Features include:

  - An easy-to-use interface.  If you can use the
    register in the back of your checkbook, you 
    can use GnuCash.  Type directly into the register,
    tab between fields, and use quick-fill to
    automatically complete the transaction.
    The interface is customizable from within the 
    application itself (no editing config files :) )
  - Quicken File Import: Import Quicken QIF style files.
    QIF files are automatically merged to eliminate 
    duplicate transactions.
  - Reconcile window  with running reconciled 
    and cleared balances makes reconciliation easy.
  - Stock/Mutual Fund Portfolios:  Track stocks
    individually (one per account) or in portfolio
    of accounts (a group of accounts that can be 
    displayed together).  
  - Get Stock & Mutual Fund quotes from various web sites, 
    update portfolio automatically (more funds being added 
    regularly).
  - Reports: Display Balance Sheet, Profit&Loss, Portfolio 
    Valuation, Transaction Reports, or account balance tracking,
    or export them as HTML.  You can write your own custom
    report if you know a little Scheme.  Reports can now be performed
    over an accounting period!
  - Multiple Currencies & Currency Trading: Multiple 
    currencies are supported and can be bought and
    sold (traded).  Currency movements between accounts
    are fully balanced when double-entry is enabled.
    (Some aspects of multiple currency support are not 
    fully implemented.)
  - Chart of Accounts: A master account can have a hierarchy
    of detail accounts underneath it.  This allows similar
    account types (e.g. Cash, Bank, Stock) to be grouped 
    into one master account (e.g. Assets).
  - Split Transactions: A single transaction can be split
    into several pieces to record taxes, fees, and
    other compound entries.
  - Double Entry: When enabled, every transaction must 
    debit one account and credit another by an equal amount.
    This ensures that the "books balance": that the 
    difference between income and outflow exactly equals
    the sum of all assets, be they bank, cash, stock or other.
  - Income/Expense Account Types (Categories):  
    These serve not only to categorize your cash flow, 
    but when used properly with the double-entry feature,
    these can provide an accurate Profit&Loss statement.
  - General Ledger: Multiple accounts can be displayed 
    in one register window at the same time.  This can
    ease the trouble of tracking down typing/entry errors.
    It also provides a convenient way of viewing a
    portfolio of many stocks, by showing all transactions
    in that portfolio.
  - Written in C with embedded scheme support via Guile.
  - Perl support is optionally available for stand-alone scripting via SWIG.
  - File access is locked in a network-safe fashion, preventing
    accidental damage if several users attempt to access the 
    same file, even if the file is NFS-mounted.
  - Provides a byte-stream format, which allows accounts and
    account groups to be transmitted to other processes
    via pipes or sockets.
  - European date handling, French, German, Swedish, and Great
    Britain translations.


Home Page:
http://gnucash.org/

Precompiled binaries:
http://www.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash/

Development versions:
http://www.gnucash.org/source_code.php3

====================
Upgrading from 1.2.x
--------------------

There are many, many changes from the 1.2 series - have a look at the
NEWS file if you want more details.  However, the most crucial ones
for installation are that GnuCash now requires the Gnome libraries
instead of Motif, and guile is required.  See the "dependancies"
section of this file for more detail.  The file format hasn't changed
(but make a backup of your data anyway . . . )

We hope you enjoy all the new features!


============
Dependencies
------------

The following packages are required to be installed to run gnucash:

  guile: provides main extension language infrastructure, used
    extensively in gnucash for initialization & startup.  Requires
    version 1.3 or later. (The guile-1.3-7 rpm works.)

  slib: scheme libraries for guile. Need version slib2c4 or later.

  libpng: portable network graphics library. Any version.

  libjpeg: JPEG image handling library. Any version.

  libz: compression library. Any version.

  xpm: X Pixmap extension. Any version.

  gnome-libs: version 1.0.40 or higher should work. These libraries
    require numerous other supporting libraries, such as gtk and glib.

To be able to use certain features of GnuCash, such as reports and
network stock price downloads, you must have the following packages
below installed (in addition to those listed above).
RPM's for most of these can be found at http://rufus.w3.org/linux/

  perl: Almost any version of perl5 should work.  I run perl-5.004 

In addition, some perl modules need to be installed:

  perl-LWP/libwww-perl-5.36
  perl-HTML/HTML-0.6
  perl-HTML/HTML-Parser-2.20
        -- these perl modules are used to fetch stock & mutual fund quotes
           off the net.  You can pick up RPMS at
           ftp://ftp.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash/binaries/RPMS
           http://rufus.w3.org/linux/RPM/PByName.html
           http://linas.org/linux/gnucash (last resort)
           or sources at
           http://www.cpan.org/CPAN.html

If you wish to use the Balance Tracker report and get nifty charts,
you will need to install:

   gnuplot:  A plotting program.
	     RPM's and debs available from the distributors
	     You can get the source from:
             http://www.gnuplot.vt.edu/ 


=======
Running
-------

For GnuCash invocation details, see the manpage in doc/gnucash.1.
Soon, you'll be able to also run gnucash --help, but that's not
finished yet...

You can start GnuCash at the command-line, with "gnucash" or "gnucash
<filename>", where <filename> is a GnuCash account file.  Sample
accounts can be found in "data" subdirectory.  *.dat files are GnuCash
accounts that can opened with the "Open File" menu entry.  *.qif files
are Quicken Import Format files that can be opened with the "Import
QIF" menu entry.

GnuCash responds to the following environment variables:

  GNC_RUN_AS_SHELL - if set, makes GnuCash pop up in a guile shell
  with all the gnucash functions loaded.  From there, you can get the
  normal startup behavior like this:

    GNC_RUN_AS_SHELL=t ./gnucash
    guile> (primitive-load (getenv "GNC_BOOTSTRAP_SCM"))
    guile> (gnc:load "startup.scm")
    guile> (gnc:main)

  This is the same thing that happens if you don't use this
  environment variable.  This can be helpful when trying to write and
  test new .scm files.

  GNC_BOOTSTRAP_SCM - the location of the initial bootstrapping scheme code.

  GNC_SCM_LOAD_PATH - an override for the GnuCash scheme load path.
  it should be a string representing a proper scheme list.  Each
  element can either be a string representing a directory, the symbol
  'default which will expand to the default path, or 'current which
  will expand to the current load-path at the instant it encounters
  the symbol.

  GNC_DEBUG - enable debugging output.  This allows you to turn on
  debugging earlier in the startup process than you can with --debug.

As an example, here's a wrapper script we used to use to allow you
to run gnucash from a local directory:

  #! /bin/sh

  export GNC_BOOTSTRAP_SCM=./share/scm/bootstrap.scm
  export GNC_SCM_LOAD_PATH='("./share/scm")'
  export GNC_DEBUG=t

  # Run whichever one was built last.
  exec ./src/gnucash \
    --debug \
    --share-dir ./share \
    --config-dir ./etc \
    --doc-path '("./doc/html/C")' \
    "$@"


====================
Internationalization
--------------------
Message catalogues exist for French and German.  These are enabled with 
environment variables.  For example, 

Francais, en bash:
    export LANG=fr_FR

Francais, en tcsh:
    setenv LANG fr_FR

German version:
    export LANG=de_DE


Other locales that should mostly work, but are still in development:

en_US
en_GB
fr_CH
de_CH


=====================
Building & Installing
---------------------

(For additional build system details, see doc/README.build-system.)

GnuCash uses GNU Automake to handle the build process, so for most of
the details, see the generic instructions in INSTALL.  Below we detail
the GnuCash specific bits.

Prior to building GnuCash, you will have to obtain and install the
following packages:

  libtool: Available at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu.
    RPM's and debs are widely available with most distributions.

  SWIG: Used to autogenerate perl wrappers - available at www.swig.org
    need 1.1p5 or later ...

  g-wrap: RPM's, debs, and source available at 
          ftp://ftp.gnucash.org/pub/g-wrap.

GnuCash understands a few non-standard ./configure options.  You
should run ./configure --help for the most up to date summary of the
supported options, but here are some more detailed descriptions of
some of them:

  --enable-opt-style-install

    Gnucash supports two types of install, the first is the normal
    /usr or /usr/local/ style, where the files are installed into
    /usr/bin /usr/lib, etc.  This is the default.

    The second style is the FSSTND, opt-style install.  In this style,
    all of the files are installed under a common subdirectory, often
    in /usr/local/opt, with the binaries going to
    /usr/local/opt/foo/bin, the libs going to /usr/local/opt/foo/lib,
    etc.  To request this style of install, just use the
    --enable-opt-style-install option to ./configure.

If you only want a particular language installed, you can set the
LINGUAS environment variable before you run configure. For example,
to only install the French translations, run

  $ export LINGUAS=fr
  $ ./configure

If you want to make sure that all languages get installed, run

  $ unset LINGUAS
  $ ./configure

The last stable release of GnuCash had a Motif based user interface,
and there was also an experimental, but never finished qt interface.
Both of these have been removed from the source tree during the
process of migrating to automake, but anyone who is interested in
resurrecting these bits can easily retrieve them from CVS.
Note that while you need the Gnome libraries installed, you don't
need to have a Gnome desktop.  

Runtime and install destinations are separate.  The --prefix you
specify to configure determines where the resulting binary will look
for things at runtime.  Normally this determines where a "make
install" will put all the files.  However, automake also supports the
variable.  DESTDIR is used during the `make install' step to relocate
install objects into a staging area.  Each object and path is prefixed
with the value of `DESTDIR' before being copied into the install area.
Here is an example of typical DESTDIR usage:

     make DESTDIR=/tmp/staging install

   This places install objects in a directory tree built under
`/tmp/staging'.  If `/gnu/bin/foo' and `/gnu/share/aclocal/foo.m4' are
to be installed, the above command would install
`/tmp/staging/gnu/bin/foo' and `/tmp/staging/gnu/share/aclocal/foo.m4'.

DESTDIR can be helpful when trying to build install images and
packages.

==============
Supported OS's
--------------

GnuCash 1.3.x is known to work with the following operating systems:

GNU/Linux             -- x86 & Alpha
Solaris		      -- Sparc
FreeBSD               -- x86

It probably works with the following :

OpenBSD               -- x86 (needs to be confirmed one way or another)


Previous versions have been known to work on the following platforms, but
their current status is unknown:

SGI IRIX              -- MIPS 
IBM AIX 4.1.5         -- RS/6000   http://www-frec.bull.com/
Unixware 7            -- Intel
SCO OpenServer 5.0.4  -- Intel

See ftp://ftp.gnucash.org/pub/xacc (high-bandwidth)
or  http://linas.org/linux/gnucash (slow-www ) 
for precompiled (but *very old*) binaries for these platforms

Gnucash can probably be made to work with most POSIX-ish platforms, 
provided the libraries and toolchain are available.

=========================
Additional Download Sites
-------------------------

Precompiled binaries & pre-requisite packages can be found at the
following sites.  The gnucash versions here are all *extremely*
old, and were indeed from gnucash's ancestor "xacc".

IBM AIX 4.1.5 
      -- SMIT-installable images 
      -- warning, this is from the 1.0 series of xacc
      http://www.bull.de/pub/
      see also http://www-frec.bull.com/
      

SCO OpenServer 5.0.4 
      http://www.sco.com/skunkware/osr5/x11/apps/xacc/VOLS.tar
      -- this is from the 1.0 series of xacc

Unixware 7
      -- use pkgadd to install
      http://www.sco.com/skunkware/uw7/x11/apps/xacc/xacc.pkg.gz

SGI Irix
      -- in SGI install format
      -- warning, this is a very down-level version
      http://linas.org/linux/xacc/xacc-1.0b7-sgi-irix.inst.tar


=======================
Getting Source with CVS
-----------------------
A read-only version of the cvs tree is available on the net.
To access it, first, login, as so:

  cvs -d :pserver:cvs@cvs.gnucash.org:/home/cvs/cvsroot login

The password is "guest"

To get a copy of the source in the experimental development tree do a

  cvs -z3 -Pd :pserver:cvs@cvs.gnucash.org:/home/cvs/cvsroot checkout -rHEAD gnucash

To get a copy of the source in the gnucash-1.2 stable production tree do a

  cvs -z3 -Pd :pserver:cvs@cvs.gnucash.org:/home/cvs/cvsroot checkout -rxacc-12-patch gnucash


==================
Developing GnuCash
------------------
Before you start developing GnuCash, you should do the following:

1. Read the file src/doc/coding-style.txt to learn about the coding-styles
   used in the GnuCash source code.

2. Several of the directories under src contain files called design.txt
   which explain many aspects of GnuCash's design. Read those.

3. Go to the gnucash website and skim the archives of the gnucash
   development mailing list.

4. Join the GnuCash development mailing list. See the gnucash website
   for details on how to do this.


Submitting a Patch:

  Once you have done some work that you would like to submit, you need
  to send a patch. There is a perl script called make-gnucash-patch
  provided with the distribution that you can use to create the
  patch. Here is how to use that perl script.

  First, set up your development directories as follows:

  < GnuCash home development directory >
      |
      |---- < directory containing original GnuCash sources >
      |
      |---- < directory containing your modified GnuCash sources >

  A concrete example of those directories might be:

  /home/me/gnucash
      |
      |---- /home/me/gnucash/gnucash.pristine (original sources)
      |
      |---- /home/me/gnucash/gnucash.mywork (original sources + my edits)

  Copy the make-gnucash-patch script to the home development directory
  (/home/me/gnucash above). Now set three environment variables to
  reflect the names of your directories. Given the names above, you
  would use:

  export GNC_MAKEPATCH_OLD_DIR=gnucash.pristine
  export GNC_MAKEPATCH_NEW_DIR=gnucash.mywork
  export GNC_MAKEPATCH_HOME_DIR=/home/me/gnucash

  Right before you make your patch, make sure *both* your working and
  your pristine directories are in sync with cvs. Run 'cvs -z3 update
  -dP' in both directories to ensure that is the case. Updating from
  cvs in your working directory may cause conficts in a file. You must
  resolve those conficts before making a patch.

  Now run the script. Note that this script requires the programs
  'makepatch', 'gzip', 'diff', and 'uuencode' (and, of course, 'perl')
  to run.

  When you run the script, three files will be generated:

  gnc.diff: This file is an ascii text file containing the differences
    between the original sources and your edits. At the bottom of this
    file is a list of the files which were added, changed, or deleted.

    Please examine this file (especially the list at the bottom) to
    make sure that all of your changes (and no other changes) are
    present in the file.

    Do not submit this file!

  gnucash.diff.gz: This is a gzipped version of the above file.
    Do not submit this file!

  gnucash.diff.gz.uue: This is a uuencoded (ascii-encoded) version of
    the above file.

    This is the file you submit.

  Send gnucash.diff.gz.uue to gnucash-patches@gnucash.org

  Thanks in advance for your contribution!