libofx and libaqbanking needs updated versions

[takamori]

Binary package hint: gnucash

I am trying to get OFX Direct Connect to work for Bank of America. I followed the instructions at
http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Setting_up_OFXDirectConnect_in_GnuCash_2
and its associated links to recompile gnucash with hbci enabled (which I understand isn't enabled by default because of licensing reasons), but that isn't sufficient, because Bank of America has updated its software so that it no longer works with the libofx 0.8.

There isn't a libofx 0.9 source distribution available for Ubuntu and I ended up downloading it from the sourceforge site.
In a similar fashion the aqbanking package is stuck on 2.x for Ubuntu (latest = 3.x).

References for relevant information:
"[Aqbanking-devel] aqofxconnect locked out by Bank of America"
http://<email address hidden>/msg01457.html
"LibOFX 0.9.0 now mandatory for KMyMoney"
http://www.nabble.com/Re:-LibOFX-0.9.0-now-mandatory-for-KMyMoney-p14555287.html

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Thanks for your bug report and for your contribution to ubuntu.

Actually, it's not possible to add HBCI support for gnucash because of legal reasons ( HBCI support needs to be compiled against a non-gpl library ). There is already some work to find a solution to that situation on bug #5973. I suggest that you participate to that bug report since it already contains comments from debian and ubuntu developers for gnucash. Perhaps that this bug can get fixed soon ( I wish )!

I set this bug as a duplicate of bug #5973

[takamori (dt02472)]

Hi Saivann, I appreciate your quick response, but it seems to me that you didn't read my bug submission carefully. I do understand/accept that HBCI isn't included by default in Ubuntu, and I certainly don't expect that to change until licensing issues are resolved (by bug 5973, which I'd already seen).

But my bug is about problems AFTER someone has recompiled gnucash with HBCI enabled.

WHEN gnucash is compiled with HBCI enabled, it won't work with Bank of America (and maybe other banks?), for the reasons mentioned in the links I included in the bug report (in particular, the aqbanking-devel thread). Basically, OFX headers have changed, and the libofx version used in the HBCI-enabled GnuCash won't work until the version of OFX (and possibly aqbanking as well) has been upgraded. It sounds like KMyMoney has already started looking into the issues, and I was hoping that the GnuCash folks would look into it as well.

Now I don't know if this requires more work than just fixing GnuCash to use a more recent version of OFX or AQBanking (or if it's not a GnuCash bug and it's some other component's bug) or if it just requires core Ubuntu devs to validate/accept the newer version of libofx, but I wanted to trigger the beginnings of the process that it takes to get this all done by submitting the bug.

The desired end result for this bug is that I would like at least to be able to pull down all the source distributions for everything I need from the Ubuntu source distributions and then compile with HBCI enabled manually, instead of having to download a tar.gz and have to muck around with the config such that it'd work okay with the standard Ubuntu directory setup, and then find out if GnuCash would work right (which it currently looks like I'll need to do).

It's possible that the bug is labelled/filed incorrectly or should be split or is the result of a bigger misunderstanding, but I thought that this bug is at least one issue that needs to be resolved in order for me to get to where I'm hoping to get to.

Thanks!

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Thanks for this explanation and sorry for my mistake! I appreciate that you give relevant informations and more details.

In fact, this bug is about more than just one bugs. It's because I want this bug to get fixed successfully that I don't confirm it because duplicates of this bug already exist :

1. You're right, in order to get gnucash to work with HBCI, it will need a updated version of libaqbanking. This bug has been already filed here : bug #68351 . Actual libaqbanking 3 isn't a stable release and I don't know if it will be a stable release before Hardy get stable. We can consider that it's not a "official" release yet.
2. In your case, most probably that you'll also need a updated version of libofx. I just opened bug #181417 for this purpose.
3. The "Master" bug is bug #5973 where people are working to make sure that gnucash will be able to support HBCI with latest versions of libaqbanking and libofx which aren't ready yet.

It's always important to choose good packages name when filing bugs and to separate each bug or fixing them become more difficult. I'm happy that you gave me more details because I realized that there was no bugs for libofx 0.9.0 so I created it.

Thanks for your contribution and feel free to comment again if you feel that we're missing something important!

[takamori (dt02472)]

Ok, so now I see that there is a GnuCash-devel thread "Online Banking and Compilation Woes" from a week ago:
https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2008-January/021935.html
which makes it sound like I might be able to simply use a newer version of libofx with the existing aqbanking; not sure if I need a newer gnucash though.

I see that IF a 3.x version of aqbanking is required, there is http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/AqBanking3_Porting to be finished.

I'll try just updating the libofx by creating a .deb using checkinstall https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CheckInstall
(I'd rather not run sudo make install) and report back on how it works out. It's possible that the issue is simply that Ubuntu needs a newer libofx rev. made available somehow (I'm on Gutsy and had followed instructions on http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Debian in order to build with HBCI enabled).

[takamori (dt02472)]

Argh, I should've refreshed my window before adding that last comment. Where did you create the libofx 0.9 package? I just was looking in the repositories for it and didn't see it... I looked at the libofx sourceforge site but don't see a .deb created for it, so I'm assuming that I still need to create the package myself, right?

Nonetheless, thanks for reviewing my comment. From what you're saying it sounds like I might still be stuck for now but I'll still investigate whether simply updating to libofx 0.9 works for me and report back. (Btw I'm not sure I see how 68351 is an issue if 5973 were to be fixed, isn't that a duplicate?)

[Micha Lenk (micha)]

Saïvann Carignan wrote: "1. [...] Actual libaqbanking 3 isn't a stable release and I don't know if it will be a stable release before Hardy get stable. We can consider that it's not a "official" release yet."

This is not true. AqBanking's official stable release is AqBanking 3.0.1. As said by takamori, it's the porting of Gnucash, that's missing:
http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/AqBanking3_Porting

Regards
  Micha

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

You're right. the official libaqbanking sourceforge site is not up to date. Anyway, that's a part of the bug #68351 which is worked by developers who knows these packages.

Concerning bug #68351 and bug #5973, bug #5973 needs bug #68351 to be fixed since we cannot build gnucash with HCBI support without the latest libaqbanking dev libraries. When a bug needs a package to be upgraded in order to get fixed, all these issues must be worked within separate bugs because it involves different teams and peoples, these are clearly different issues. Otherwise, it's not easy for developers to work on these bugs.

Concerning the problems that you have with gnucash ( compiling with HBCI enabled ), since this gnucash version is not the version included in ubuntu repositories, you can't file a bug in gnucash concerning that problem since ubuntu developers will not be able to fix this ( but you can speak to other people who knows how it works on https://answers.launchpad.net/ or in some forums ).

In order to get bugs properly fixed, if there's a real problem with gnucash compiled from source, you can file a bug in their own bug tracking system and if you need a special library to be included in ubuntu repositories, you can file a bug in launchpad since this can be worked by ubuntu developers. That's why I created bug #181417 to ask the new version of libofx.

Now I believe that developers already have all the informations they need in order to work on this problem. You can stay tuned and participate by testing the new releases when they will come out. You can also try to compile libofx and libaqbanking yourself and then compile gnucash with these libraries and if you know something about packaging, perhaps that you can help debian and ubuntu packagers to make good debian packages for these libraries based on the old ones. If you believe that you can add some important necessary informations that are missing on one of these 3 bugs, you can also help by adding these informations to these bug reports ( be sure that your informations are accurate and useful and that will be great! ).

Thanks for all informations you provided so far about this bug.