[GNC] File Format Documentation (Bug 777893)

[Geert Janssens]

Op donderdag 16 augustus 2018 02:33:32 CEST schreef Derek Atkins:
> Depends on the platform.
> On Linux the sqlite dbd may not come installed.
> 
> -derek
> Sent using my mobile device. Please excuse any typos.

To clarify this a bit, whether or not sqlite is included in the package as the 
user receives it is not something the developers decide.

It depends on two factors:
1. whether the person creating the final gnucash package has enabled support 
for it while building gnucash
2. whether the PC on which this package gets installed also has the necessary 
libdbi packages installed.

For Windows and OS X the gnucash project provides the packages itself. And we 
make sure everyting that's needed is there for sqlite. So indeed on these two 
platforms gnucash can work with sqlite without installing anything extra. On 
linux and variants packaging is a distro specific thing. I suspect most 
distros by now build gnucash with libdbi support, but we don't control this.

The packager on linux distros also decides whether installing gnucash should 
trigger installation of the libdbi sqlite driver as well by default. And as 
Derek points out on Fedora this is not the case.

I would also point out that at least the Windows package is ready for the 
three sql formats. That is if you have access to a mysql or postgresql 
database already you can use it straight away with gnucash without installing 
anything additionally (like libdbi as your table suggests). And I *think* the 
same goes for the OS X package though I can only go by what's in the package 
configuration script. I can't test in practice.

So (unless I'm wrong on the OS X part) to summarize:
- Windows and OS X: support for all formats out of the box
- On linux and similar package based systems: support for db formats depends 
on how gnucash was built for that platform and may require additional libdbi 
packages to be installed for full db support.
- In all cases gnucash does not provide the mysql or postgresql *server*. 
Setting this up or getting access to one is the user's responsability.

Do you see a way to incorporate this platform dependent info in your table ?

Regards,

Geert