Problem with X11 version of GnuCash on MacOSX

[Mike Alexander]

--On October 19, 2013 7:27:20 AM -0700 John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> 
wrote:

>
> On Oct 19, 2013, at 1:03 AM, Geert Janssens
> <janssens-geert at telenet.be> wrote:
>
>> Hi Mike,
>>
>> I don't know much about the internals of Gtk/Gdk either.
>>
>> You refer to a missing system schema. Perhaps this is because
>> GnuCash  now overwrites the XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable in
>> some cases.  This is done in order to find the GnuCash specific
>> schemas if GnuCash is  not installed in /usr.
>>
>> Can you perhaps run a git bisect to pinpoint the exact commit that
>> first  shows this error ? That would help to eliminate some
>> speculation.
>
> I dug through the code a bit and discovered that
> gdk_pixbuf_new_from_file does depend upon a function called
> xdg_run_command_on_dirs (located in glib/gio/xdgmime/xdgmime.c if you
> want to go look at it) which tries to find the mime files in the
> following directories (in order): $XDG_DATA_HOME, $HOME/.local/share,
> $XDG_DATA_DIRS. If it gets to $XDG_DATA_DIRS and it's not defined, it
> set it to /usr/local/share:/usr/share.
>
> That last bit is probably the problem. It makes sense that in some
> cases users might want to override the default data directories and
> prevent them being searched, but perhaps glib should warn that that's
> not the case.
>
> Mike, do you have XDG_DATA_DIRS set in your environment? Where are
> the mime and mime-info directories installed on your system? If
> you're not using it for something else, you could try pointing
> XDG_DATA_HOME at that directory.

Thanks for the hints.  They made the problem easy to find.  The change 
in r23225 on October 7 is causing the problem.  It made GnuCash set 
XDG_DATA_DIRS if it is being installed in a non-standard location. 
Unfortunately it sets it to something that won't work on my machine.

I use MacPorts to install GnuCash's dependencies, but not GnuCash 
itself.  This is much easier than trying to install all the 
dependencies by hand.  MacPorts installs to /opt/local and its version 
of xdg_run_command_on_dirs knows to look in /opt/local/share so 
everything works fine if XDG_DATA_DIRS is not set.  Unfortunately the 
GnuCash Makefile doesn't know about this and assumes the normal default 
location of /usr/local/share.

Ideally I'd like to fix this by changing the Makefile to use the 
default location that will be used by glib, but I can't figure out how 
to get glib to tell me the default in the Makefile.  Instead I changed 
it to use the compile time value of XDG_DATA_DIRS as a default if it is 
set.  If it is not set, the path will have a double colon in it, but 
that shouldn't hurt.  I'll check this in if no one sees any reason not 
to.

I noticed, by the way, that environment.in uses semi-colons for path 
separaters, even on Unix.  Will this work?  For example it sets PATH to

   PATH={GNC_BIN};{PATH}

Is environment.in used on Windows?  If so perhaps we need to use the 
correct path separator depending on the platform.

        Mike