[H-GEN] Is GnuCash ready for prime-time? Was: RFC: SCO

[Greg Black]

On 2003-06-18, Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
> Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> writes:
> > On 2003-06-17, Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
> >> Imagine being able to see something misbehave and *immediately*
> >> connecting a debugger and having the sources *right there* to refer
> >> to!  I'm pretty sure it'd be possible to do this with a BSD---Greg?
> >> Any opinions?
> >
> > Well, it would be possible to do this with any system that you
> > chose to build entirely from sources
> 
> I was very disappointed to see how hard it was to do with the Debian
> packaging stuff; as I recall it wasn't easy to install the software
> into the correct locations *and* have the debugger aware of where the
> sources were at the same time.

I think it would be a real pain with FreeBSD, unless you were
one of the people who builds the entire thing from source.  And
I suspect that's true of most systems, although I'm prepared to
discover I'm wrong ...

> > I would not want general systems built with debugging symbols
> > and all the other space- and time-wasting flimflam that would
> > make this kind of thing work.
> 
> I've probably been a bit unclear---I wouldn't necessarily leave
> debugging symbols in *every* program:  some are big enough already and
> others aren't that critical.  Others, like the news fetching software,
> are critical to my environment[1] and won't suffer unduly from the
> increased disk requirement or speed problems.

Not being a "build world from source" person, I'm not sure how
painful it would be to do selective debugging builds.  I think
that, once you want to get down to this level, you generally
have to waste some of your own cycles setting things up the way
you want.

> >> In the particular case of leafnode, because I had to fetch, compile,
> >> and install the software to try to track down the problem, my window
> >> closed and to this day I don't know what was *really* going on.
> >
> > If you really wanted to know, you could have setup two boxes
> > with their clocks set back to the time when the error happened
> > and repeated the test ;-) 
> 
> Oh, trust me, I really wanted to know---it was stopping me from
> reading *USENET*!!!  If I had two computers to throw at a problem like
> that right now I would be having a lot more fun.

As I recall, some technical problem stopped me from reading
Usenet about 8 years ago -- ah yes, I remember: it was a lack of
time.

> > After all, time-sensitive bugs are common and this is basically the
> > only way to track them.
> 
> True enough.  I was very annoyed when the problem just "went away".
> Can't wait for the switch back to normal time.

Well it would be a matter of a few minutes to craft a zoneinfo
file that switched into DST every Saturday and out every Sunday
and then run your buggy software from an environment where TZ
was set to that file.  If it's really the switch that triggers
the problem, this will do it for you.  If you don't know the
file format, the documentation won't take long to get on top of.

I look forward to hearing the outcome ...

Greg

-- 
Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> <http://www.gbch.net/gjb.html>
GPG signed mail preferred; further information in headers.
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