Question Re: ANNOUNCE: Announcement: GnuCash 2.6.6 Release 2015-03-30

[Edward Doolittle]

The latency with Dropbox could be more of an issue than people might
imagine at first. If I understand correctly, Dropbox updates files in the
order smallest file size to largest. Now imagine that you're GnuCash data
store is "large", and you're also updating a lot of "medium" sized files at
the same time. Your GnuCash lock file is of course "small". You close
GnuCash, the lockfile is removed and that is immediately reflected by
Dropbox. Then Dropbox continues uploading your many "medium" sized files.
The GnuCash data store is then not updated for a long time, even though the
lock file is gone. If a user on another machine then opens GnuCash, she
would be working with an old version, even though the lock file wasn't
present.

The best way to manage Dropbox-related race conditions: Dropbox for unix
comes with a useful command-line utility that will check whether a file is
up to date or not. That utility could be integrated into a shell script to
open GnuCash only if the data store is up-to-date. I don't know whether the
same utility is available on Windows and Mac.

Another hack-ish way around this particular race condition would be to make
the lock file the same size as the data store. There are still other race
conditions, though, so it would be best to use the command-line utility.

There are still errors that can occur, if (say) you're using GnuCash on a
laptop which you move to a location without an Internet connection while
GnuCash is open. Use care when sharing a GnuCash file over Dropbox.



On 1 April 2015 at 20:53, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:

>
> > On Apr 1, 2015, at 6:47 PM, Steve Suehs <skelter at skelter.net> wrote:
> >
> > John,
> >
> > It is nice to see GnuCash progressing and  under active development.
> >
> > One of the things I used to love about GnuCash way way back in the day
> was a shared backend database with PostgreSQL. My dream, at the time, was
> that both my wife and I could be in the system and both working on it for
> our family finances.  It didn't actually work out that way.
> >
> > Every few years, I take a look at what is out there.  I rarely find
> something available for couples, or roommates, or communes, or small
> organizations.  Have you seen anything?
> >
> > Best wishes, and congrats on another GnuCash release!
> >
>
> Thanks for the good wishes, but please remember to send all correspondence
> to the list, not to individual developers.
>
> As you probably know if you've been following the mailing list for the
> last year, we're working on redesigning the GnuCash core ("engine") to be a
> true database application instead of simply using the database as an
> alternative to an XML file as that early, unsuccessful, Postgres backend
> did and as our current SQL backend does. There's a lot of work to be done
> and I'm currently the only one doing it (Aaron Laws contributed a couple of
> modules last fall but has since been too busy with real life to contribute
> further), so it's going to take a very long time.
>
> As for other accounting applications, I don't know of any that are
> oriented towards personal finances and can support multiple simultaneous
> users. The mechanics of Accounting are pretty much the same no matter what
> sort of entity you're keeping the books for, so the only reason not to use
> an enterprise-grade package like OpenERP or Grisby might be that they
> support only accrual accounting. I've not used any of those packages so I
> don't know for sure.
>
> ISTM though that it shouldn't be too hard to make sure that your wife and
> you aren't working on bookkeeping at the same time, so I'd think that you
> could use a shared GnuCash file without too much trouble. Administering a
> DB server is a PITA, so I'd recommend just using a shared folder to keep a
> GnuCash XML or SQLite3 file. Dropbox and Google Drive are also known to
> work, though the latency in any remote service can be big enough to cause a
> race for setting the lock file if both of you happen to try  to work on
> accounts at the same time.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>
>
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-- 
Edward Doolittle
Associate Professor of Mathematics
First Nations University of Canada
1 First Nations Way, Regina SK S4S 7K2

« Toutes les fois que je donne une place vacante, je fais cent mécontents
et un ingrat. »
-- Louis XIV, dans Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV, Chap. XXVI