Can't update preferences and can't get rid of Welcome dialog in Gnucash 2.4.7 (OS X 2.6.8)

[John Ralls]

On Aug 7, 2011, at 5:57 PM, prl wrote:

> 
> Hi, John. Before I try logging a bug against GConf, I'd like to try to try to find out more about where and why the problem is happening. I've tried turning on logging in gconfd by setting the environment variable GCONF_DEBUG_OUTPUT in the Gnucash script and adding a logging entry to a file for user.* to /etc/syslog.conf, but I haven't been able to get any debugging info out of gconf. Any suggestions?
> 
>> I think we tried that last year when we were trying to do just what you're asking about and it caused other problems without fixing the file path problem, but my memory might be wrong. Did you try it and get it to work?
>> 
> 
> You're right: just changing $* to "$@" isn't enough. The code that shifts out the first argument if it starts with "-psn_" also fails. It can be fixed in the Gnucash script by changing:
> 
>    if [ x`echo "x$1" | sed -e "s/^x-psn_.*//"` == x ]; then
>        shift 1
>    fi
> 
> to
> 
>    if expr "x$1" : '^x-psn_' > /dev/null; then
>        shift 1
>    fi
> 
> making use of the not-so-well-known regular expression matching in expr(1). Alternatively, it can also be fixed by using a pipeline of the echo and grep. I have tested that both those approaches work with --add-price-quotes=FILE where FILE contains spaces. Of course, $* needs to be changed to "$@" as well.


Peter,

GConf uses the g_log facility, so I guess the client will be outputting to gnucash.trace, but the daemon will be writing to its stdout. There's a comment in gconfd.c about shipping everything to syslog, but I don't see any code to make that happen.

The shell trick seems to work, but I can't really test it thoroughly right now since the markets are closed and prices aren't changing. I'll whack on it a bit tomorrow. As for the little-known regex argument to expr, I sure didn't know about it. Thanks! (BTW, according to expr(1), the leading ^ isn't necessary: it's implied anyway.)

Regards,
John Ralls