Problems with accounts in gnucash/accounts

[Didier Vidal]

Hi everybody,

This is a follow-up to the problem of default accounts in the druid
launched when you create a new gnucash file.

Previous threads can be found:
Here: (a thread on the devel list)
https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2005-October/014308.html
And here: (a thread on the patch list)
https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-patches/2005-October/016815.html

Quick summary:
The xea files in share/gnucash/accounts/<LANG> are not read correctly in
most locales because the XML files don't specify their encoding in the
header. As a result, the druid is not functional on all locales that
have non utf8 chars in their xea files.

Two proposals have been made to fix the problem:
a) [my preferred proposition] specify the encoding in the XML files.
This proposal is not favored by everybody. Some argue that it is better
to ship only utf-8 configuration files in the G2 version of gnucash
b) convert all the files to utf-8 (using iconv for instance). This
proposal has also a problem: it is inconsistent to put an utf-8 file in
a directory named fr_FR, where one would expect to have the regular
encoding for this locale (ISO-8859-1). Personally, I would not recommend
this approach.

I made an additional test:
rename accounts/fr_FR to accounts/fr_FR.UTF-8 and convert its content to
utf8. Without changing anything to the gnucash code.

This does not give satisfaction either:
   * the druid works well with the locale fr_FR.UTF-8
   * BUT the druid uses the english accounts with the locale fr_FR


A solution that:
  - works with all locales (utf8 or not)
  - does not require to ship non utf8 files
  - does not require to create misleading directories (ie utf8 content
in a directory named fr_FR)
would probably require to change the algorithm used to find the default
account directory for a given locale. Is anybody knowledgeable on this
part ? Is there also a consensus to reject proposition a) ?

Didier.