running concurrent gnucashes with one database

[John Ralls]

> On Jan 18, 2016, at 5:54 AM, Adrian Mariano <radian at cox.net> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 01:46:27PM +0000, Colin Law wrote:
>> On 18 January 2016 at 13:32, Adrian Mariano <radian at cox.net> wrote:
>>> Unless I have a way of forcing it to quit from another machine
>>> (e.g. logging in and running kill on it), this isn't enough to solve
>>> the problem, really.  Can gnucash give up its lock if you click
>>> "save" so that I could switch to a different invocation without
>>> closing the first one?
>> 
>> As well as doing that it would have to prevent you making any changes
>> until it had acquired the lock again.
>> 
> 
> If it noticed that the lock was taken and went into read only mode
> then that goal would be accomplished.
> 

No, GnuCash cannot at present support more than one user in the database at a time, has no ability to surrender the lock after a timeout, and (probably more important) doesn't reload the database after it first opens it. So even if you break the lock from another instance of GnuCash and make changes there, the already-running GnuCash won't see those changes until you close the database and reopen it. We're working on proper multi-user access for a future release but it's a major design change and will take several years to complete.

Regards,
John Ralls