How To Stop GnuCash from Saying It Cannot Find a Specific File

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.us
Tue Feb 28 22:55:44 EST 2017


> On Feb 28, 2017, at 1:50 PM, Bored Accountant <ddoak at student.morainepark.edu> wrote:
> 
> Mike or Penny Novack-3 wrote
>> The default is for gnucash to try to open the file last opened (and in 
>> your case, that no longer exists). You can't get back to the original 
>> state of never having opened gnucash before.
>> 
>> But you CAN tell gnucash to open "nofile" (which is what many of us who 
>> are keeping several different books do since the "last one open" is 
>> probably NOT the one we want to open.
>> 
>> Michael D Novack
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> 
> No offence, but that seems like bad programming. For example, in the
> Audacity audio editing program, when you move or delete a project and then
> click the "Open" menu function, Audacity will throw the error that it cannot
> find the file, *but then Audacity will remove the project from the "Recent"
> menu*. And that's not the only piece of software that will account for
> people deleting or moving files. In fact, most software will not only have
> "failsafe" code programed into the software to specifically handle these
> types of situations; but will even give you the option to delete files from
> within the software thus avoiding the situation altogether. I noticed that
> GnuCash doesn't even have an option to delete files from within the
> software. Again, this seems like bad programming.
> 
> Now yes, I fully understand this is free software and I shouldn't complain
> too harshly; but this seems like plain-old "common sense" to me. How could
> the developers leave such a glaring bug in the software? Also, to address
> your comment of "You can't get back to the original state of never having
> opened gnucash before.", my question to that is "Why not?" Why can't GnuCash
> just open to "grey" if it can't find the proper files? Other software, such
> as Sage 50, does just that. I personally think that the developers should
> seriously consider such "common sense" programming. Again, I understand that
> this is free and open-source software. However, I do not think the
> developers should use that as an excuse for lazy programing. Just my two
> cents. 

There's another far more common use case that you're not considering: That the storage in which the last-opened file lives isn't presently mounted. In that case removing the file from history without permission like you're advocating would be pretty anti-social. I think we'll leave it the way it is.

Regards,
John Ralls



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