MacOS cannot save settings

[Geert Janssens]

On donderdag 10 maart 2011, John Ralls wrote:
> On Mar 9, 2011, at 8:11 PM, John Ralls wrote:
> > On Mar 9, 2011, at 12:22 PM, Michael wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >> As I read the contents of the "path"-file, it searches for a default
> >> file, if it cant find the user's settings file. But as i can see, there
> >> is no /opt/gnucash-2.3.x directory.
> >> 
> >> What can I do?
> > 
> > That's really bizarre. Gnucash hasn't used /opt/gnucash-2.3.x since
> > 2.3.8, over a year ago, and I don't think that GConf has used
> > .gconf.path in quite a while, either.  The 2.4.3 I just launched didn't
> > seem to need either (meaning that I deleted the ancient remnants of both
> > and launched Gnucash-2.4.3 and it started up with the last accounts file
> > I had had open and appeared to have my preferences set correctly. When I
> > quit Gnucash, neither ~/.gconf.path and /opt existed.
> > 
> > Try deleting .gconf.path
> 
> Hmm, digging a bit deeper, I see that the path file is now in the bundle,
> at Gnucash.app/Contents/Resources/etc/gconf/2/path, and that it might very
> well be hard-coded to /Users/john/Library/Gnucash-2.4/etc/gconf.
> 
> See it that's the case on  yours, and if it is, try editing that file to
> point to your Library instead.
> 
> Regards,
> John Ralls
> 
The paths used in gconf's path file are set at the time gconf is built. This 
is a relic of the linux way of determining the installation path at configure 
time.

Just so you know, I'm looking into a very similar issue on Windows 7 (64bit) 
currently (which I don't have myself). The paths are wrong there as well.

The writeable path is set to $(HOME)/.gconf in the config file, all the others 
are read-only paths. So even if these read-only paths use non-existing 
prefixes, that shouldn't cause the failure of saving parameters to 
$(HOME)/.gconf as far as I can tell.

Only a ~/.gconf.path could possibly override this.

By the way, gconf sets $(HOME) to g_get_home_dir on linux and OS X and to 
g_get_user_config_dir on Windows.

I'm scratching my head for quite some time now on this one. So it would be 
great to find what did cause it exactly.

Geert