Gnucash versions 2.2.9 and 2.4.10 broken in Debian Squeeze

[John Ralls]

On Jan 9, 2013, at 7:51 PM, Ken Heard <kenslists at teksavvy.com> wrote:

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> On 2013-01-09 15:34, John Ralls wrote:
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>> That you found other packages failing certainly suggests a packaging
>> problem. In any case, users should go to their distros for support and
>> not report problems upstream unless directed to do so -- but in general
>> it's better for the packager to deal with upstream, since they're more
>> likely to have the expertise needed to find the problem.
> 
> You may be interested in the only reply I have so far received to my
> post on the Debian user list:
> 
>> Such partial upgrades are not really tested. I would suggest you upgrade
>> Gnucash to the squeeze version too.
>> With the spare information in this bug report it is not possible to say,
>> if that is really a glib issue. That said, my suggestion would be to
>> talk to the Gnucash maintainers.
> 
> The subject of Debian bug report I filed was the libglib2.0-0 package,
> and the above answer refers only to that package.  Your comment that I
> found other packages nevertheless suggests that it may still be a
> libglib2.0-0 problem.
> 
> In any event, my next step now is to address my Debian bug report to the
> *Debian* Gnucash maintainer, who probably at this point is unaware of
> the problem, and also add to that report the stack-trace information I
> sent to you.  (Thanks by the way for introducing stack-tracking to me.)
> 
> The result of the correspondence so far is to raise a second issue.  The
> first is solving my problem.  The second is where the ultimate
> responsibility to solve my problem lies.  You suggest starting with
> Debian, which I tend to agree is the correct thing to do first, and
> which I will do.  If it cannot be solved at the Debian level, then
> perhaps it would be time for the Debian people and the Gnucash people to
> talk to each other.


Sadly, it's rare for distro packagers to interact with any of the upstream projects that I work on. That's kind of a Linux-only problem for most projects: Those which distribute MSWin and Mac packages tend to bundle everything together and can therefore support the result more thoroughly. That's certainly the case here. For Linux, OTOH, we don't even supply binaries, only source, but for Mac and MSWin we supply ready-to-run packages with all of the dependencies.

In the short term, I suspect that doing a full upgrade to Squeeze might indeed be your best option. You might get a USB disk or large thumb and install it there so you don't risk doing further harm to your current installation.

But there's one thing that it occurs to me to try first: It's possible that the 2.4.10 problem is due to some old bits os 2.2.9 hanging around, so try uninstalling it, then open a terminal session and issue the following:

sudo rm -r /usr/lib/gnucash
sudo rm /usr/lib/libgnc*

and reinstall Gnucash. 

Regards,
John Ralls