Re: Feasibility of system() plugin?

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Sat, Feb 23, 2002 at 05:48:57PM -0500, Leigh Smith wrote:
> I'd like to retrieve market data and have the share prices appear in cells 
> that can then be used for calculations. Recalculating the sheet would cause 
> new values to be fetched.
This is probably best handled as an extension of the gda plugin.  We
definitely would like to work on accessing external data, but have
not focused on that as yet.
 
> The easiest way I can see that would have some value to everyone else would 
> be to implement a function SYSTEM() that would take a string of the command 
> to be executed and return a numeric value. Therefore =SYSTEM("get_shares 
> ORCL")
EEP NO!
That has several flaws.
1) Security
2) Security
3) Security
...
98) We'd want some parsing info on how to parse the results.
99) The interface would need some work to define refresh handling
(polling interval vs monitoring a file for a change)

This type of operation is common enough that we will add the notion
of an external data source to gnumeric.  However, I have not given it
much consideration yet.