Unable to retrieve quotes

[Donald Allen]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 6:46 PM, AmigaPhil <AmigaPhil at ping.be> wrote:
> Test EACH commodity for which you have enable the "online price retrieval"
> with gnc-fq-dump.
> If just one Perl module fails (because the source on the web has changed,
> this happen quiet often), the whole price retrieval process fails.
> (I had this problem with "LeRevenu" as source some months ago.)

Thanks, but that could not have been the problem, since, as I
described in my second message yesterday, I tried this on two
different systems with the same gnucash file, thus requested the same
quotes from the same sources; one failed, one worked.

I've just solved this. It was/is an Arch problem, which I discovered
by making lists of the installed packages, with version numbers, on
both systems and diff'ing them. The failing system had a number of
packages that were behind the working system,  including the
perl-date-manip package that is used by gnucash's quote-retrieval
machinery.

One of the differences between the two systems was the mirrorlist
files. Arch had updated the mirrorlist, but they don't install it --
that's up to you. I *had* installed it on the failing system and had
not yet done so on the system that was working. On the failing system,
apparently the US mirrors that were at the top of the new list were
not up-to-date, unlike the working system. The Arch package manager
claimed both systems were up-to-date, even though one was behind the
other (the package manager was not at fault, of course; it was just
reporting based on what the mirrors were telling it, which was
different in the two cases). Once I got the failing system pointed at
a mirror that was *really* up-to-date and re-did the system update,
the problem went away.

Why things were broken in the first place on a system that was
up-to-date with respect to a mirror that was a little behind the times
is a whole 'nuther discussion, involving  the tradeoffs between
aggressive, rolling-update distributions like Arch, vs. conservative,
heavily tested distributions like Debian that release infrequently.

/Don Allen
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> AmigaPhil
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