[GNC] Cannot change preferences

[Ken Heard]

On 2018-08-17 03:27, Geert Janssens wrote:

> Actually as of gnucash 2.6 the preferences are managed via GSettings. On linux
> this means the settings are stored in dconf by default. We had a few cases
> early on where gnucash was installed on systems that didn't have dconf
> installed. In that case GSettings will only store settings in-memory and they
> will be reset each time you restart gnucash.
> 
> A few things to check:
> 1. Is dconf running properly on your system ?

I think so, in that all packages relating to dconf are installed.  (This 
is my first encounter with dconf.)

> 2. can you edit the gnucash preferences using dconf-editor ? In the editor the
> gnucash preferences are found under /org/gnucash

Directory ~/.gnucash contains three files and three directories.  the 
files are accelerator-map, expressions-2.0 and stylesheets-2-0.  The 
three directories are books, checks and translog. The last two are empty.

The first one, books, contains the following files which are not empty: 
ChartOfAccounts.gnucash.gcm, gca.gnucash.gcm. ken09.gnc, ken09.gnc.gcm, 
Kens.gnucash.gcm and pqtz.gnucash.gcm. Of these files, Kens.gnucash.gcm 
is dated 2018-08-16.  All the others are dated in 2014 or earlier.
None of these files appear to me to contain the preference selections.

> 3. When you try to alter a preference via gnucash, are there any messages in
> the gnucash trace file [1] ?

For instance, I want to change the default date format from 'Locale 
31/07/13' to 'ISO 2013-07-31'.  I can select the latter from the 
drop-down list, but 'Locale 31/07/13' remains as the selected format. 
The same thing happens for all other preference options; nothing can be 
changed from the default.

I would expect that the default preferences and the changed preferences 
would be in the same file, not in a different file.  So the defaults 
must be somewhere where gnucash can find them.  Where would that 
'somewhere' be, and where would the changes be recorded?

No messages of any kind appear in the trace file.  It has been empty 
since I opened gnucash today.


> Finally as for the choice of account tree separator, you can choose anything
> you like. Full account names are not file names so there is no interference
> whatsoever between gnucash' interpretation of account names and the system's
> file management.

True, as long as the tree separator is never used in any account name or 
code.

Regards, Ken