GnuCash 2.2.0 under Windows (problems)

[Josh Sled]

(Please make sure to Cc: the mailing list on all replies; your mailer's
"Reply-to-All" or "Reply-to-List" functionality should do this.)

Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> writes:
>>This is a great find.  Please file a bug for the issue at
>><http://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=GnuCash>.
>>
>>When you say "will {,not} work properly", do you mean "basically startup at
>>all"?  Like, with a space-and-/or-ampersand-containing username, gnucash won't
>>start up, but with a "simple" username it will?
>>
>>
>>  
>>
> No Josh --- GnuCash more or less works in the sense that you can start up,
> create a set of books, save those, enter transactions in those, save them
> etc. But what you CAN'T do is save any preference changes. You can't (for
> example) turn off  "tip of the day", can't change the save frequency from 5
> minutes to 10, etc. This is the problem which I initially reported having and
> which I first assumed was something I had perhaps done wrong when first using
> GnuCash. It was after testing, first in the "administrator" account and then
> in a test account without administrator privilege (worked fine in both cases)
> that I tracked it down to the account name dependence.

Oh, that's right; sorry for forgetting.


> I've joined the devl list and posted a description of the problem there. I
> will of course post a bug report, but am first looking for a developer to
> point me to the right subsystem since if possible, I'd like to include the
> coding error along with the bug report. This isn't an urgent bug. More of a
> nuisance problem than a serious show stopper as likely very few XP users have
> a space in the name let alone an ampersand (it's probably the space -- many
> is the time I have seen a programmer go astray incorrectly assuming that a
> string couldn't legitimately contain a space).

As I tried to describe in the mail you quoted, I think the subsystem is
"gconf" ... that is, somewhere in the entire gconf module.

We use the gconf-provided client library to make calls of the form
gconf_client_{get,set}_{int,float,bool,string,...}.  These calls are are
encapsulated in src/core-utils/gnc-gconf-utils.[ch].

But, again, we don't manage any of that storage.  Any paths that involve a
directory based on the user name gnucash doesn't construct or traffic in.

Not to say that the problem isn't caused by GnuCash... somehow.  Just that if
the problem is an interaction with gconf, and related to the name of the
account in use, nothing we do at runtime explicitly involves the account name
or home directory.


> MEANWHILE -- if any end users report the problem "can't save preference
> changes" we should ask what user name they use. The easiest work around is
> that they create a special account in which to run GnuCash (changing the name
> of their regular account is NOT simple. Oh yes Windows will allow an
> administrator to do this. But then all the path data in their non MS
> application data becomes invalid -- their T'Bird or F'Fox or SeaMonkey,
> etc. "profiles" won't work without path tweaking --- and that includes
> GnuCash user data (take a look at the contents of your file ..gtk-bookmarks
> for example)

FWIW, GnuCash does a similar thing.  In particular, the "recent opened file"
history is stored as file paths; this doesn't seem unreasonable.  Apart from
that, I can't think of any information we save that's not
username-independent.

> Michael
-- 
...jsled
http://asynchronous.org/ - a=jsled; b=asynchronous.org; echo ${a}@${b}
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 188 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/attachments/20070807/c0721595/attachment.bin