We now parse, and also print, posting-less journal entries, as I
proposed on the lists.
These are not real General Journal entries/transactions, but here is my
rationale:
- Ledger and beancount parse them
- if we parse them, we should print them
- they provide a natural way to record and report non-transaction events
- most of all, they permit more gradual introduction and learning of the concepts.
Eg a beginner can keep a simple journal even before learning about accounts and postings.
When a transaction posts to two commodities without specifying the
conversion price, we generate a price which makes it balance
(cf http://hledger.org/manual.html#prices).
Until now, these generated prices were always shown with full precision
(all available decimal digits) so that a manual calculation with the
displayed numbers would agree.
If there's just one posting in the commodity being priced, we can use an
exact total price and the precision is no problem.
But if there are multiple postings in the commodity being priced, we
must show the averaged unit price. This can be an irrational number,
which with our current Decimal-based implementation would display an
excessive 255 decimal digits. So in this case we now set the price's
display precision to the sum of the (max) display precisions of the
commodities involved. An example:
hledgerdev -f- print
<<<
1/1
c C 10.00
c C 11.00
d D -320.00
>>>
2015/01/01
c C 10.00 @ D 15.2381
c C 11.00 @ D 15.2381
d D -320.00
>>>=0
There might still be cases where this will show more price decimal
places than necessary. For now, YAGNI.
A transaction/posting status of ! (pending) was effectively equivalent
to * (cleared). Now it's a separate state, not matched by --cleared.
The new Ledger-compatible --pending flag matches it, and so does
--uncleared. The equivalent search queries are now status:*, status:!
and status: (the old status:1 and status:0 spellings are deprecated).
Since we interpret --uncleared and status: as "any state except cleared",
it's not currently possible to match things which are neither cleared
nor pending.
The regex account aliases added in 0.24 trip up people switching between
hledger and Ledger. (Also they are currently slow).
This change makes the old non-regex aliases the default; they are
unsurprising, useful, and pretty close in functionality to Ledger's.
The new regex aliases are also available; they must be enclosed in
forward slashes. Ledger effectively ignores these, which is ok.
Also clarify docs, refactor, and use the same parser for alias
directives and alias options
-N doesn't seem to be used by Ledger currently; we'll
use it as shortcut for --no-total.
-T is used by Ledger to set a custom value expression for the final
total. I'm going to take it as a shortcut for --row-total instead.
