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

[Geert Janssens]

Op dinsdag 28 februari 2017 13:50:45 CET schreef Bored Accountant:
> 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.

Dear Bored Accountant,

Others have raised most of the points I was going to make as well, so I'll 
skip those.

I'll admit it's very tempting to go into defensive/counter-attack mode because 
of the communication style you chose. You can observe this in some of the 
other replies as well. Again I'll try not to.

 I'll just add one more point here for completeness.

This issue has been discussed multiple times in the past. In 2005 an 
enhancement request was filed [1] to make gnucash automatically remove items 
from the most recently used list if the file couldn't be found. It got 
implemented that way in 2006 and promptly got averse reactions. Users 
considered this a bug. A bug report [2] was raised to undo this behavior, 
which I did in 2011.

However at the same time I do understand people are uneasy with how things are 
now. There could be names in the list of files that really don't exist any 
more.

So in 2013 I've added a topic to our faq [3] to explain how they can be 
removed. This topic was improved upon by several others to cover all supported 
operating systems.

And in addition I decided in 2011 the program could handle this more elegantly 
so I chose to keep the original request [1] open and add suggestions towards 
better approaches. I believe any of those are relatively easy to implement for 
someone with some moderate gtk development experience. I have been hoping for 
someone to step up and do so, allowing me and the other core developers to 
keep focused instead on the more complicated issues. So far this hasn't 
happened. I may fix it myself one day but currently there are more urgent 
matters.

And that's all there is to it as far as I know.

Regards,

Geert

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=388500
[2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=628342
[3] http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/
FAQ#Q:_I_have_deleted_a_gnucash_file_from_my_computer._How_can_I_remove_that_file_from_the_File_menu.
27s_short_list_.28MRU.29_as_well_.3F