Problems with accounts in gnucash/accounts

[Christian Stimming]

Hi Didier,

thanks for the reminder about this issue. I thought to follow up in SVN 
but forgot so far.

I definitely agree with your proposal (a), i.e. the encoding needs to be 
specified and that's that.

The question about an additional encoding conversion from the current 
iso-8859-1 (?) to utf8 is relatively orthogonal to that and can be 
performed at a later point in time anyway. I don't agree that shipping 
non-utf8 files were a bad thing; instead, IMHO we only have to make sure 
that all files can be interpreted correctly by libxml2. Gnucash will 
only deal with the utf8-encoded strings that are returned from libxml2. 
Specifying the encoding is a sufficient solution to this problem.

Whether the locale itself is in utf8 or not doesn't actually matter at 
all, as long as the encoding is specified in the xml file.

I will add the encoding in SVN this weekend.

Christian

Didier Vidal schrieb:
> 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.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-devel mailing list
> gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
>