[GNC] GNUcash 3.2 flatpak file open issue

[Colin Law]

Thanks for working that out Geert.  It has allowed me to get gnucash
to generate a trace file by running
sudo flatpak override org.gnucash.GnuCash --filesystem=/tmp
It appears that the flatpak does not have access to /tmp without this.
It would be better, obviously, if that were built into the flatpak,
assuming that it can be. I have updated the issue [1].

Having done that I am trying to get mysql access going.  Looking in
the trace file I see on startup
WARN <gnc.app-utils> Could not spawn perl: Failed to execute child
process “perl” (No such file or directory)
but I think that is not the problem.  When I attempt to Save As to mysql I get
CRIT <gnc.backend.dbi> [GncDbiBackend<Type>::session_begin()] Unable
to connect to database 'gnucash'
If I stop the mysql server I get the same message which suggests it is
not able to access the server..
The user/pwd are correct, confirmed by CLI access to the server, which
is localhost.  Also mysql access works on a home built version of 3.2
on the same machine.

I have looked at the documentation for flatpak override but I can't
see anything there that might fix this issue.

Colin

[1] https://github.com/flathub/org.gnucash.GnuCash/issues/16
On Fri, 10 Aug 2018 at 15:17, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
>
> I have been playing with the gnucash flatpak package in the last few days.
>
> And I can add some information regarding the file open issues (though not
> everything is clear yet).
>
> For starters I can confirm that by default USB sticks and network shares are
> not accessible. I have fouind this is due to flatpak's security policy which
> states: by default allow as little access as possible. This clearly excludes
> mounted media and network shares.
>
> This limitation can be relaxed though with the "flatpak override" command. In
> particular by running
>   flatpak override org.gnucash.GnuCash --filesystem=<path-to-allow>
>
> <path-to-allow> can be any filesystem path you wish to access from within
> gnucash. For example on Fedora usb sticks are mounted under /run/media so I
> have run
>
>   flatpak override org.gnucash.GnuCash --filesystem=/run/media
>
> And now USB sticks appear in the gnucash File->Open dialog.
>
> It appears on Ubuntu and derivatives however usb sticks are mounted under
> /media so on those platforms the command would become
>
>   flatpak override org.gnucash.GnuCash --filesystem=/media
>
> The same can be done for any network shares that are not mounted under your
> home directory. For example if you have a mounted network share under /mynet
> you can allow access by running
>
>   flatpak override org.gnucash.GnuCash --filesystem=/mynet
>
> One caveat:
> I had some permission issues on my system, which I don't know were due to how
> my system is set up or a bug in flatpak. As my flatpaks are installed system
> wide, the flatpak information is stored in /var/lib/flatpak and only the root
> user has write access there.
>
> So I had to prefix each command with 'sudo'. With this the commands ran fine,
> but I still had issues because the file permissions of the generated override
> file and its parent directory, "overrides", didn't grant access to ordinary
> users.
>
> I fixed this by running following two commands:
> sudo chmod o=rx /var/lib/flatpak/overrides
> sudo chmod o+r /var/lib/flatpak/overrides/org.gnucash.GnuCash
>
> You may or may not need to do something similar on your system. YMMV.
>
> Hopefully this will make flatpak a viable alternative for more users that want
> to try out gnucash 3 while it's not yet available on their preferred platform.
>
> Regards,
>
> Geert
>
> Op vrijdag 27 juli 2018 01:06:49 CEST schreef DaveC49:
> > Adrien, David,
> >
> > The same issue occurs in Linux Mint 19(Tara) which is Ubuntu 18.04 based.
> > Nemo (file explorer)  can see the mounted USB stick and access it directly
> > or via the /media/<user>/ mount point for the device but the Gnucash file
> > open dialog neither sees the USB stick or /media/<user>/ mount point when
> > you click on other locations. It only lists a restricted set of the
> > directories under / by comparison with what can be accessed from Nemo. Not
> > being able to access the /media mount points would qualify as a bug.
> >
> >  On LM19 /media has 755 permissions, the user directory under it has 750 and
> > the mounted USB stick has 755 permissions.
> >
> > The file->Open dialog in LibreOffice which looks to be a similar GTK3 dialog
> > does display the USB stick in the sidebar and it sees all the directories
> > under / as well as any networked locations which don't show up in GnuCash
> > either.
> >
> > if no-one has already filked a bug i will put one in later today.
> >
> > David Cousens
>
>
>
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