Fixed columns vs saved column widths

[Geert Janssens]

This is related to bug 628960 [1], more particularly the part about how 
GnuCash deals with column widths in the SX window.

As in the accounts window, the column widths for all columns are stored in 
gconf. Obviously the intention here is to store and restore changes the user 
made to these column widths.

And this works very well,... except for those columns the user can't change 
the width of. In this case, the originally calculated width is stored in gconf 
and the user has no option to fix the width, except for directly modifying the 
gconf value. You could argue that's no problem, the width can't change anyway. 
But that's not correct. There are several cases the width can change:
* the case of a column title translation error as the bug reveals
* the case where a user defines a new system font or font size
* the case where a user switches to a different language (perhaps even with a 
different character set, like Chinese or Japanese).

Granted, these things don't happen often, but if they do, the user ends up in 
an uncomfortable situation that is not easily remedied from a user's point of 
view.

So I thought we could improve on this. I see two ways, but I'd like to hear 
some opinions on which way is the most user friendly:
* drop the idea of unresizeable columns. Let the user decide for himself how 
wide to make each column, including the one we devs thought would warant a 
fixed size.
* alternatively we can keep the columns unresizeable by the user, but in that 
case, I think we should not save/restore the size value to/from gconf. Instead 
the size should be calculated each time the column is created, depending on 
the parameters available then (the translation can have changed, a new font 
can be chosen,...).

I have a difficult time estimating what's the best solution. What are your 
opinions ?

Geert

[1] See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=628960