Default save-as file format: Rather stick to XML?

[Phil Longstaff]

On November 3, 2009 04:31:36 pm Christian Stimming wrote:
> Am Sonntag, 1. November 2009 schrieb Phil Longstaff:
> 
> What do you mean by "switch back to XML"? I'm not talking about disabling
> anything, or automatically changing any file from one format to another.
> 
> What I'm talking about is the *default* for when people use the "Save-As"
> dialog, which implicitly also concerns everyone who creates a new data
>  file. What I'm proposing is for *this* cases to have XML selected as
>  default, and have sqlite available as another option, but not the other
>  way round as it is right now.
> 
> Note that talking about "SQL" in the context of our financial software
>  might also have the unintended side-effect that users implicitly expect
>  full multi- user database capabilities, which we are unable to deliver
>  right now and also in the short and medium-term future. Hence, even if we
>  promote the sqlite and/or pg backends more than we currently do, we must
>  be cautious not to raise the expectation of a multi-user capable system.
>  Instead, gnucash is and (in the medium-term future) will be a single-user
>  system which incidentally can save its data in several formats, but that's
>  it. An XML file doesn't leave any doubt about this scope, but anything
>  sql-related does. IMHO that's another (although weak) reason to stick to
>  the XML file format as *default* - but the others can and should be
>  offered as options.

Another possibility is simply in the packaging.  The Save As dialog will only 
present options for which a libdbi dbd driver is available.  For linux (and I 
assume for mac), the user needs to install specific dbd drivers.  By default, I 
think they are not installed, so that XML is the only option which will be 
available.  On win32, we provide all dbd drivers in the setup.exe file.  
Perhaps we should not include them, but should make them available in a 
separate gnucash-dbd-setup.exe file.  Then, again, only XML would be available 
unless the user downloaded and ran gnucash-dbd-setup.exe.

Phil