GNUcash crashes on save - losing all changes

[Vincent V]

Excuse the dramatic title (although it is true) but someone else had a 
similar problem recently so I thought it would attract their attention.

The good news is that the problem is easily reproducible so tracking 
down the bug should be possible. I discovered it by accident when moving 
my company accounts files from my home PC to my new office PC, I did 
this by burning them onto CD and copying them from that. Unfortunately I 
did it as root and forgot to select 'Preserve permissions' in K3B so the 
copied files were all owned by root but had global read permissions. I 
am running Mandrake 9.1, but I don't think this has anything to do with 
the bug.

To reproduce the bug:
Make the directory which contains the accounts file and the files within 
it read-only
Start GNUcash from the menu and open the file (if it automatically opens 
the file at start up the result is the same)

You get the message:
            GNUcash could not obtain the lock
Select 'Open Anyway '
Made some changes - actually you don't need to make any changes to get 
the bug
Save the file, you get the message:
          Error: An error occurred while processing  /path/filename
Select OK then Cancel on the File Save dialogue that appears
Save again (originally I did Save As), you get the message:
    Application "/usr/bin/guile-1.41" (process 16239) has crashed due to 
a fatal error. (Segmentation fault)
Select Close

And that's it, GNUcash terminates without saving your changes


Vince