preferences

[Phil Longstaff]

On Tue, 2011-05-24 at 10:32 -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Maris <maris.rob at vdi.de> writes:
> 
> > I'm going to use gnucash as an effective means to do bookkeeping of my
> > hours spent to several customers and associated projects, using the
> > STD  currency as shortform for "Stunden" (hours) in german.
> >
> > At this time I encounter the need to select different preferences for
> > this application than for my financial bookkeeping. But the
> > preferences are  stored globally. Is there any means to have them
> > associated with the  gnucash file opened?
> 
> At this time I'm afraid that no, the split of preferences is not
> amenable to this.  It's something that needs to be worked on.
> 
> One thing that would be helpful would be a list of every preference and
> a way to categorize it as:
> 
> - user pref      (per user for every data file)
> - data pref      (per data file for every user)
> - user/data      (per user, per data file)
> 
> I believe there are lots of prefs in the first item that arguably should
> live in the second or third category.  Note that File -> Properties
> (instead of Edit -> Preferences) provides access to the second category.

I wonder whether these are different sets of prefs that are mutually
exclusive, or different levels of override, or maybe there are some of
both.

A "preference" like "default currency for new accounts" would need to be
a data pref and maybe should never be overridden.  However, others, like
default register view, might have a data pref value which would be used
unless also specified as a user pref or a user/data pref.  So, is there
1 set of prefs and the prefs code looks at user/data, user pref and data
pref in that order until it finds a value, or does the UI (or whatever)
code know which set of prefs will hold the particular value it wants?

Phil