Custom reports do not load after upgrade to 2.6.4 on OSX

[Geert Janssens]

On Monday 20 October 2014 12:23:12 Derek Atkins wrote:
> John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> writes:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > It seems that the processing of config.user isn’t setting the
> > default
> > path, so load is looking in the current pwd. Try changing your
> > config.user to say
> > (load gnc-build-dotgnucash-path(“saltant-invoice.scm”)) etc..
> 
> Just to be clear, this should probably look like:
> 
>   (load (gnc-build-dotgnucash-path "saltant-invoice.scm"))
> 
While that is a good workaround it tapers over the actual bug.

The format used by John W. used to work until gnucash 2.6.3 and stopped working on 2.6.4. I 
can even reproduce this on Fedora so it's not OS X specific.

I have traced it back to my patch for
Bug 711567 - Cannot save a custom report if a path contain diacritic chars

And looking back it's relatively easy to explain: until 2.6.3 it was guile that loaded the config 
file and ran the commands in it. In this case it is a bunch of load commands with relative path 
names. Guile will resolve these path names relative to the config file.

In gnucash 2.6.4 though the file is loaded by the c code and the commands in it are passed as a 
plain string to guile. In this case guile no longer knows about the location of the original config 
file and can no longer resolve the relative path names correctly.

I have some mixed feelings on how to deal with this.

The proper solution is to make guile handle pathnames with diacritical characters correctly on 
Windows. I've spent about a week trying to do so with the help of both the mingw and the guile 
community and failed. I don't feel like spending even more time trying to work around broken 
charset support in an external library on Windows.

On the other hand Derek's workaround is fairly easy. So I'm tempted to just update the wiki 
page that explains how to load a custom report and continue with more pressing matters.

What do you think ?

Geert