Hacking GnuCash

If you are new to CVS, you may want to take a moment and visit the Concurrent Versions System Home Page, and in particular, the documentation page. CVS allows multiple users to modify the source code for GnuCash, each without stepping on the toes (and changes) made by others. If CVS seems at first overwhelming, don't let it be so: its quite easy to learn and use.

To access the CVS tree, first, login, as so:

The password is "guest" ; after entering the password, you will be immediately returned to the command prompt. You can now use other CVS commands to view the source. To get a copy of the latest/beta development version (which is currently version 1.9.x), do a

Start with a distributed binary version of GnuCash, in order to get dependencies resolved. For example, Redhat 8.0 provides gnome-desktop-devel-2.0.6-4.i386.rpm, but GnuCash does not currently support gnome2 (as of January 2003). To find a path through the "dependencies hell" this leads to, you could use the following procedure:

1. Try to install the gnucash binary from your distribution. For example, gnucash-1.6.6-7.i386.rpm
2. Note the missing dependencies.
3. Install those dependencies and associated -devel packages (if any).
4. Go to step 1.
5. Once you get GnuCash installed, remove it. :-)
6. Download the source for the latest gnucash development version from CVS. All dependecies except for g-wrap are the same in GnuCash 1.6.x and 1.8.x
7. Remove g-wrap, if necessary.
8. Download g-wrap-1.3.4 from http://www.gnucash.org/pub/g-wrap/
9. Build g-wrap and gnucash
10. Install additional -devel packages when configure complains

If any of these steps don't make sense to you, you probably need more background material. Start with the README file in the source tree. Note that the GnuCash source code is converted to LXR hyperlinked web pages daily. However, you may find browsing with ctags in your own file system to be a bit speedier.

Older versions and branches can be accessed with tags. The branch containing the latest version of the stable gnucash-1.6.x code is marked with the tag gnucash-1-6-branch . Thus, to check out the latest in the the gnucash-1.6.x series, do the following:

Released versions are tagged with the number of the release. Thus, the tag gnucash-1-6-0 will get you a copy of the source as it was for version 1.6.0. If you are a developer, you should probably be working either in the head branch (HEAD) on the latest beta/development code, or in the gnucash-1-6-branch, squashing any remaining bugs in the current stable version.

Other tags of (mostly historical) interest are:

xacc-09a

Robin Clark's original source from October 1997. For history buffs only: the source has been completely re-written since then.

xacc-10b17

version 1.0.17 (one of the last stable version of xacc, before the name was changed to gnucash).

xacc-10-patch

the tip of the branch of the stable version 1.0.x series.

xacc-11b6

version 1.1.6 (an unstable, development version of gnucash)

xacc-12-patch

the tip of the 1.2 branch. This is the last branch containing motif code. Later versions were re-written in gtk/gnome.

patch-124

version 1.2.4, one of the last in the 1.2.x series.

gnucash-1-4-branch

the tip of the 1.4.x branch, the tip of the previous stable branch.

gnucash-1-6-branch

the tip of the 1.6.x branch, which is the current stable branch.

In order to speed up the performance of CVS, some of the older tags (stuff older than mid-year 2000, mostly; and some newer stuff) and branches have been removed from the mainline CVS tree. To those who are interested in doing historical mining of the CVS tree as it used to be, you can supply an older branch tag to the following repository:

cvs -d :pserver:cvs@cvs.gnucash.org:/home/cvs/cvsroot checkout -r <some-tag> gnucash-archive