Need to recover from system crash (more information)

[Michael J. O'Donnell]

This is followup information to a note that I posted a few minutes ago.

I installed gnucash on another machine running the same version of
Ubuntu Karmic Koala. There was no error in the installation, and I
started gnucash successfully both from a terminal window, and from the
Applications menu. It did not complain about paths, but it gave the same
first message that I got from the problematic system:

> odonnell at Celionati:~$ gnucash
> gnc.bin-Message: main: binreloc relocation support was disabled at
> configure time.
When I tried to start up remotely in a ssh terminal session, with X11
forwarding, I *did* get the complaint about paths, and things hung with
lots of terminal output that I did not wade through.

I inspected /var/lib/dpkg/info/gnucash.prerm
> odonnell at Tumbleweed:/var/lib/dpkg/info$ cat gnucash.prerm
> #!/bin/sh
> set -e
> # Automatically added by dh_gconf
> if [ "$1" = remove ] || [ "$1" = upgrade ]; then
>     gconf-schemas --unregister
> apps_gnucash_dialog_business_common.schemas
> apps_gnucash_dialog_commodities.schemas
> apps_gnucash_dialog_common.schemas apps_gnucash_dialog_hbci.schemas
> apps_gnucash_dialog_prices.schemas
> apps_gnucash_dialog_print_checks.schemas
> apps_gnucash_dialog_reconcile.schemas
> apps_gnucash_dialog_scheduled_transctions.schemas
> apps_gnucash_dialog_totd.schemas apps_gnucash_general.schemas
> apps_gnucash_history.schemas
> apps_gnucash_import_generic_matcher.schemas
> apps_gnucash_import_qif.schemas apps_gnucash_warnings.schemas
> apps_gnucash_window_pages_account_tree.schemas
> apps_gnucash_window_pages_register.schemas
> fi
> # End automatically added section
and gnucash.postinst

> odonnell at Tumbleweed:/var/lib/dpkg/info$ cat gnucash.postinst
...
> # Automatically added by dh_gconf
> if [ "$1" = "configure" ]; then
>     gconf-schemas --register
> apps_gnucash_dialog_business_common.schemas
> apps_gnucash_dialog_commodities.schemas
> apps_gnucash_dialog_common.schemas apps_gnucash_dialog_hbci.schemas
> apps_gnucash_dialog_prices.schemas
> apps_gnucash_dialog_print_checks.schemas
> apps_gnucash_dialog_reconcile.schemas
> apps_gnucash_dialog_scheduled_transctions.schemas
> apps_gnucash_dialog_totd.schemas apps_gnucash_general.schemas
> apps_gnucash_history.schemas
> apps_gnucash_import_generic_matcher.schemas
> apps_gnucash_import_qif.schemas apps_gnucash_warnings.schemas
> apps_gnucash_window_pages_account_tree.schemas
> apps_gnucash_window_pages_register.schemas
> fi
> # End automatically added section
I strongly suspect that the problem is intimately tied up with gconf
schemas, and probably I have never succeeded in restoring gconf to a
coherent state from which I can get a clean install. I am rather shocked
that /var/lib/dpkg/info *.postinst scripts are modified after
installation by other applications, such as gconf. That seems like
rather bad architecture, but probably nothing that the gnucash project
can fix on its own, unless there's some more robust code that could go
into gnucash.prerm and gnucash.postinst to restore some clean state when
gconf messes up.

Cheers,

Mike O'D.