[GNC] Gnucash crashes after upgrade

[Geert Janssens]

Op zaterdag 24 augustus 2019 20:17:50 CEST schreef gnucash3 at skewray.com:
> A year or two ago I was running Ubuntu 16.10. When I upgraded to the next
> Ubuntu version, Gnucash did some moving and reformatting of my config files.
> When I ran Gnucash, it would hang up inside any register and crash.  I
> 'solved' the problem by running 2.6.12 in Virtualbox on Ubuntu 16.04, which
> is what I've been doing ever since.  Ubuntu has upgraded a few times, and
> the issue persists.  The current version that still doesn't work is Gnucash
> 3.4.
> 
> Is this a known issue? Is ther a previous thread in this list that addresses
> this?  If not, how would I go about starting to debug the issue?
> 
> Places where config files seem to be:
>     .config/gnucash
>     .gconf/apps/gnucash
>     .gnucash/books/Gnucash
>     .local/share/gnucash/books
> I don't know which of these is from before the conversion and which are new.
> The problem might also be in a library, I guess.

A few more bits that were omitted or glossed over in the other responses:

.gconf/apps/gnucash predates even gnucash 2.6. If you have no intention to 
rerun gnucash 2.4, you can safely remove this.
Of the others
.gnucash/ is the config directory used by gnucash2.6
.config/gnucash and .local/share/gnucash are used by gnucash 3.x

If you have been running gnucash in a VM, and now run gnucash on your main 
system, obviously it won't find the config data stored in your VM. If you 
would like gnucash to redo the config data conversion for you, you'll have to
1. copy everything from .gnucash/ in your VM to .gnucash/ on your main system
2. delete .local/share/gnucash and .config/gnucash from your main system
3. start gnucash

As others have noted, if that still crashes, we're need more details to 
determine the root cause. A trace file would be useful [1] or if you know how 
to use the gdb debugger tool, a backtrace usually holds more details still.

Regards,

Geert

[1] http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Tracefile