Problem with X11 version of GnuCash on MacOSX

Geert Janssens janssens-geert at telenet.be
Tue Oct 22 05:26:33 EDT 2013


On Sunday 20 October 2013 10:19:57 Mike Alexander wrote:
> On Oct 20, 2013, at 4:40 AM, Geert Janssens <janssens-
geert at telenet.be> wrote:
> > It seems odd to me that you would need to insert the compile time
> > value of XDG_DATA_DIRS. Is it only set at compile time for you or
> > does your runtime environment have a different value for
> > XDG_DATA_DIRS than your compile time environment ?
> 
> I changed my build script to set XDG_DATA_DIRS so that I don't have to
> set it at run time.  That way I can just run GnuCash without having
> to use a script to start it or changing my default environment.
> > I also wonder if the change of ";" to ":" alone would not have fixed
> > this issue. This was clearly a bug, which I would expect to only
> > have
> > influence if XDG_DATA_DIRS is actually set in the runtime
> > environment.
> No, because XDG_DATA_DIRS wasn't set at run time and the default value
> GnuCash uses is wrong for my setup.  GnuCash was overriding the
> default (which for me is /opt/local/share) with an incorrect value
> (/usr/local/share).
> 
>             Mike

Mike,

I have been pondering this for a while. I don't really like this fix 
conceptually. It's MacPorts that deviates from the X Free Desktop 
standard and I don't like it that this exception in one platform only 
results in changed code on all other platforms.

A better solution would be to detect the MacPorts platform at configure 
time, and set a proper conditional based on this, which is then used in 
the makefile to do some MacPorts specific overrides. That makes it 
easier for other developers to understand as well which particular 
change is for that platform only.

But while thinking this alternative approach through, I concluded that 
it may even make the issue more complicated. So for now I have chosen to 
elaborate the comment in the makefile a bit to clarify *why* the compile 
time value of XDG_DATA_DIRS was added.

Geert


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