GnuCash 2.2.0 under Windows (problems)

[Andreas Köhler]

Hi,

Am Dienstag, den 07.08.2007, 08:46 -0400 schrieb Mike or Penny Novack:
> "Thanks a lot for the report! I do not know whether we can do a lot 
> about that though."
> 
> I'm a senior analyst, not just a programmer. Sometimes the "solution" to 
> a problem doesn't involve the code. I appreciate that it might not be 
> practical to fix the code, but that doesn't mean "do nothing" in a 
> situation like this.
> 
> We have a GnuCash release for Windows, and we have discovered that it 
> won't work (completely properly) for all Windows users. What do we do 
> about that if we can't fix the code? A number of possibilities:
> 1) We place a release note warning for Windows users along the lines  
> "will not work  if your  Windows account name contains ......."
>     I  for one would have seen that (certainly AFTER encountering the 
> problem). But since few end users read the documentation.
> 2) A "first time only" routine that examines the name of the data 
> directory (the user account name) and if an "illegal character" is 
> encountered, pops up a message explaining the problem and suggesting 
> that if the person wants to use GnuCash with everything working properly 
> they create another Windows account to do that in.
> 3) We alert the "user help" list so that when puzzled Windows users come 
> in with inquiries about "not working" they get an explanation (I've 
> already done that). Being unfamiliar with GnuCash and the data 
> structures it uses, this took me some time to figure out (first had to 
> notice missing .gconf directory). I did figure it out in the end, but 
> you can't expect even a knowlegable end user to do this for themselves!

Maybe

2') the installer detects an invalid character in the path to the home
directory, tells the user and asks him to enter an alternate path.  That
is used for gconf and maybe other stuff as well.  This sounds pretty
vague, because I will have to check what is possible first.

> <ampersand> is a legal character in Windows directory names. This 
> problem would not affect my evaluation report with regard to our own 
> organization using GnuCash but I will be doing two evaluation reports, 
> one for "us" (MA Chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation) and one 
> for "the OpenCD" group.
> 
> I am not as sure, BTW, that there wouldn't be some way around this. Note 
> that not all of the GnuCash code has difficulty coping with the "&". For 
> example, no problem being able to find the set of books I created (that 
> path has the "&" in it too -- did not prevent a correct path being 
> placed in .gtk-bookmarks). Instead of my jumping into the code, may I 
> ask a question? Is the problem (precise specification)
> 
> "...if any of those characters appears in a gconf configuration source 
> address, then that is declared as invalid..."
> Did that mean "in the name of the directory in which the directory 
> .gconf will be placed" or "in the name of any directory in the path to 
> the directory in which .gconf will be placed"?

It seems to be the latter.

> The former should not be 
> the same insurmountable problem as the latter. I must admit to being a 
> little surprised to discover that the configuration directories (and the 
> file .gtk-bookmarks) were simply dropped separately into the top level 
> of the user data directory as up to now all open source for Windows apps 
> I have tried have created an "application data directory" for stuff like 
> that -- good practice since it prevents any chance of a name conflict 
> with a directory or file already in the user's data directory (now only 
> the name for the app data directory itself need be unique).

maybe this can be combined with 2'), maybe not.
Note that actually the data is distributed in application-specific
directories.  A windows user just would not expect that granularity.

I will report my findings on -devel later this week.

> Michael

-- andi5