GNUcash crashes on save - losing all changes

[John Zoetebier]

On Wed, 16 Jul 2003 13:08:37 +0100, Vincent V <vincentv at dsl.pipex.com> 
wrote:

> Thanks for the input John, but Graham has really picked up on the main 
> point of my message.
> The reason I sent it in was because another (new) user had reported 
> something similar but was unable to replicate it. I, the on the other 
> hand, suspected what the cause might be and did a bit of experimenting to 
> prove it. As a software engineer myself, I know that the first thing you 
> need to do to pinpoint a bug is to reproduce it systematically, so this 
> information should be useful to the developers.
>
> When the 'file lock' warning (not error) came up I thought it had 
> something to do with my file transfer and when it refused to save I was 
> pretty sure that the file permissions were wrong for some reason, but it 
> should have allowed me to do a 'save as' and under no circumstances 
> should it have crashed.
>
> By the way, did you try it yourselves and get the same results?

I repeated the steps and got the same result, if the folder is read-only.
If only the files are read-only there is no problem.

In this case you can argue that the system should check file permissions 
before continuing or saving files.
However there are a zillion other ways in which things can go wrong and if 
GnuCash wants to check for each of them people will start complaining that 
it is so slow.
I still feel that GnuCash gave a valid warning message.
In addition I feel that the design of an application can make some 
reasonable assumptions about its environment.
Otherwise you end up replicating a security system in your application.

Someone suggested to display a "save as", however from a security point of 
view this may be not acceptable.
For example you have a read-only version on CD ROM which you use for demo 
purposes on a trade show.
Now you do not want people to make a copy of your data by using "save as" 
,right ?
This may not be the best example, but my fear is that at last people want 
the system to make coffee as well :)

-- 
John Zoetebier
Web site: http://www.transparent.co.nz