[GNC] Concern with the lengthy list of "Known Issues"

[Geert Janssens]

Op maandag 22 juli 2019 00:09:02 CEST schreef David Cousens via gnucash-user:
> Scott,
> 
> I have been using GnuCash 3.6 on Linux Mint 19.1 since it was released (and
> most of the V3 releases usually within a few days of their release) without
> any significant issues at all. My usage is mainly for personal accounting
> but I do use  a subset of the business features as well for a couple of
> small ventures. The early V3.x versions certainly had a few more serious
> issues but nearly all could be worked around fairly easily. Those have
> largely been eliminated over the first 3-4 releases in the series.  The vast
> majority of the list of remaining  issues largely qualify as minor
> inconveniences and do not affect the core functionality of GnuCash. Others
> with more demanding use of GnuCash than mine may disagree however.
> 
> The major issue with the shift from the 2.6 series to the v3 series is the
> change in location of the configurations and the need to copy any stored
> reports etc from the old location to the new location. These changes are
> described in the wiki and there are posts in the GnuCash User archive
> around the issues with stored reports.
> (https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Configuration_Locations)

Allow me to stress this particular issue should be fixed for most users. 
Gnucash is supposed to do this migration for you, but due to a few bugs in the 
early 3.x releases this failed in several cases. The migration should be much 
improved in more recent releases.

If you still encounter this particular issue, please do report it and please 
do follow up on future fixes by emulating a migration to verify if these fixes 
would have solved your migration.

So how can you emulate a migration ?
1. You need your original DOT_GNUCASH_DIR [1] (.gnucash) still present on your 
computer
2. Rename your GNC_DATA_DIR [1] and GNC_CONFIG_DIR [1] to something like 
GnuCash-good (Note that on Macos and Windows GNC_DATA_DIR [1] and 
GNC_CONFIG_DIR [1] are one and the same directory so there's only one 
directory to rename on those platforms). Note this serves both as a backup of 
your known good data and to reset the migration. If these directories exist, 
the migration won't run.
3. Start gnucash 3.x
4. Verify
- it pops up a metadata migration notice.
- gnucash opens with the same tabs open as when you last closed your book in 
gnucash 2.6 (ypu may have opened and closed tabs in the 3.x series but we're 
migrating from the 2.6 situation!)
- your saved report configurations are there (again as they were in gnucash 
2.6 - you may have made changes meanwhile by running gnucash 3.x on your book 
for some time).
6. If they are, migration works for you. If not, there is still a bug in the 
migration that needs fixing. Please file a bug report [2] and attach the most 
recent tracefile [3] (the one that was generated while testing the migration).

Last but not least:
7. quit GnuCash
8. Remove the newly created GNC_DATA_DIR [1] and GNC_CONFIG_DIR [1]
8. Rename GNC_DATA_DIR [1] and GNC_CONFIG_DIR [1] from GnuCash-good back to 
their original names on your platform

Regards,

Geert

[1] I'm using symbolic names for these directories as their exact names are 
platform dependent. You can find the exact names for your platform here:
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Configuration_Locations
[2] Refer to http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Bugzilla on how to use our bug 
tracker
[3] http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Tracefile