Freecoins conduit (again)

[Derek Atkins]

Quoting Will McDonald <will at cs.wisc.edu>:

> Out of curiosity, what are the impedements to making the engine
> multi-access safe? I certainly believe you about the requirements, but
> when I read about GnuCash being designed as a "stand-alone server", I
> imagine it being network(/socket/fifo/whatever) accessible and allowing
> atomic actions with any number of clients. Am I picturing the design
> correctly, and if so, how far are we from that?

The engine is not designed for multi-access.  The backend may allow
multiple engines to use the same data store, but the engine is tied
to a specific running (client) application.  So, no, you are not picturing
the design correctly.

In order to get multiple applications to access the same GnuCash data file
you would need to create/use a backend that allowed multiple engine
connections.  The only backend that allows that right now is the
postgres backend.  So, you'd need to run a postgres server in order to
do what you imagine.  At least for now.

My hope is that we can eventually create a SQLite backend which has
some of the same characteristics as postgres and would allow you to
run multiple applications simultaneously to access/modify a single
gnucash data file.

-derek

       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available