is gnucash files patch/diff friendly?

Zhang Weiwu zhangweiwu at realss.com
Mon Jun 15 09:43:08 EDT 2009


Hello. We are using gnucash files without compression. I am wondering if
gnucash files are patch/diff friendly, because we often share other
files (for other projects) using unison, a file synchronization tool,
that merges changes from two modified version using traditional
diff/patch unix commands.

Say, if person A recorded a transaction, person B recorded a different
transaction, both kept the last unmodified version, can they merge their
changes with traditional unix diff/patch?

Some text formats are patch/diff friendly and some are not. I can
imagine, e.g. if gnucash keeps account sum in file, then it is not
patch/diff-friendly, because two transactions both changed sum,
resulting a conflict.

I mostly believe gnucash must not be patch/diff friendly because it may
result inefficient loading & saving, unless an index is maintained
outside of the main transaction record and gets updated when finding
index & transaction modification date different. But I ask anyway, just
in case.

Thanks.


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