[GNC-dev] 3.4 metadata location

[Geert Janssens]

Op zondag 3 maart 2019 23:02:05 CEST schreef John Ralls:
> > On Mar 3, 2019, at 1:33 PM, Chris Graves <mohavebaked at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > I normally use gnucash on macos, but today, was experimenting with flatpak
> > Build ID: git 3.4-145-gc9ddd6c82+(2019-02-23) on fedora 29.  I seem to
> > remember seeing recent emails that the location of the metadata was in
> > ~/.local.  But the message upon launching gnucash displayed the following
> > popup:
> > 
> > Notice
> > Your gnucash metadata has been migrated.
> > Old location: /home/chris/.gnucash
> > New location: /home/chris/.var/app/org.gnucash.GnuCash/data/gnucash
> > 
> > 
> > No complaints, just curious...
> 
> I *think* that has to do with flatpak's sandboxing, the idea being that each
> flatpack gets its own directory in ~/.var so that two can't compete over
> ~/.local, but I'm not sure. Geert's the expert on flatpaks and he's away
> for a bit.
> 
> Regards,
> John Ralls

I'm only now finding this message in my backlog...

Yes the odd location is due to flatpak sandboxing the gnucash application by 
setting up different locations for GTK_DATA_HOME and GTK_CONFIG_HOME.

The fact that this is different when a native gnucash package is used instead 
of a flatpak package, does have implications for our support efforts.

It means that if users have gnucash related issues on linux we should inquire 
on the installation source: system package, flatpak or snap. Which most users 
are probably unaware of by default so it would be useful to determine easy 
ways to get that information from the user (preferably methods that work on 
all linux flavors).

It also means switching from a flatpak version to a native version should be 
considered a migration from one platform to another and requires the user to 
copy over all metadata from one configuration location to another.

In the long rung we probably will want to treat flatpaks and snaps as separate 
platforms and document them as such. For now the flatpak package format is 
beta still and we currently have no official support for snaps. Though it 
looks these formats will seriously change the way apps are distributed on 
linux in the future (there are defenders and critics as always but from what I 
see things are shifting).

Geert