Location of new GnuCash style sheets

[David T.]

Thanks, Geert.

Perhaps it would be good to revisit these historical tics and consider whether other solutions might make more sense in a more highly connected computing landscape.

I (and I believe many others, based on the list traffic over the years) find that Gnucash’s ways of handling data in the OS can be difficult to understand. The integration of some data directly in the data file (e.g., memorized transactions, OFX mappings), the global storage of reports (such that a report for one set of books appears in others that do not have the same account structures), the littering of the main data file folder with its myriad logs and backups, not to mention this particular circumstance, lead to confusion for end users. Mind you, this last one comes up much less frequently.

Obviously, with the multiple OS support, and the intended move to database storage, there are a lot of moving parts that make a solution challenging. Perhaps a high level discussion of the different types of information GnuCash uses and stores would be a good place to begin an analysis of how to create an overarching plan for storage of these data across systems? Or perhaps there already exists such a list, and we need to alter the documentation to make this more clear. I am aware of 2.7 in the Guide, but this section is not exhaustive and focuses on a particular aspect of the storage.

To my way of thinking, I would prefer some preferences-based mechanism to gather files in the OS into book-based folders, with an option to store logs in a sub-folder. Users think of a set of books and their reports as a unit; putting these files into one folder mirrors this model. 

I don’t expect my status as a curmudgeonly end user to change in the near future, so I do not expect to be helping with the actual code, but I hope we can consider ways to improve this aspect.

David


> On Aug 1, 2015, at 4:15 AM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> 
> On Friday 31 July 2015 22:50:52 David T. wrote:
>> John,
>> 
>> I note that this folder does not display to Mac users by default.
>> Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to place these files in some visible
>> spot, since they are user-created?
>> 
> Perhaps.
> 
> This data has historically always been in a hidden directory. The 
> original developers seemed to consider stylesheets as configuration data 
> rather than a separate user-created file. The use case of sharing this 
> was probably never considered.
> 
> Personally I haven't made up my mind yet on which approach is best.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Geert
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.