[GNC] How to run GNUcash in portable fashion?

aeneas receiver at gowdygroup.net
Fri Oct 26 12:52:33 EDT 2018


One of the nice things about software designed to run on multiple platforms
is that it tends to avoid the use of platform specific features.  I've had
very good success setting up various open source packages to run on Windows
in a portable fashion.  While the  Portable Apps
<https://portableapps.com/apps>   offering has some very nice capabilities
there are a couple of issues that cause me to like my own method better. 
One of these is the slowness with which new releases get transitioned to
their platform, which is the current case with GNUcash Version 3.3.

I've attempted to setup GNUcash to run flash memory in a manner that it can
be easily taken from one computer to another.  Coincidentally it looks like
GNUcash made a change in Version 3.3 that should make this work well.  I
noticed that the files used for storing persistent state information have
been moved from a folder named ".gnucash" which was located in the folder
referenced by the Windows environment variable named "%HOMEPATH%" to the
folder referenced by the Windows environment variable named "%APPDATA%". 
The problem is that it appears as though GNUcash does not bother to use
these environment variables but rather hard codes the folder names using
absolute paths assigned to the "C:\" drive with the default values for the
paths that Windows normally assigns to the indicated variables.

Of course the reason for having these variables is so that the paths can be
changed external to the software that needs to use such storage.  I cannot
think of a good reason for using these paths but ignoring the variables. 
Rather if GNUcash did use these variables I suspect that it might work vary
well from a portable drive that could be used on different computers.  Is
there any chance that GNUcash might consider doing something as normal as
this?



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