[GNC] Assistance on transition from one OS to another

[John Ralls]

> On Jun 18, 2019, at 8:05 PM, David T. via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> I am a long time user of gnucash on a Mac, and am now transitioning to either windows or linux; I'm still sorting out which. 
> This message is decidedly NOT a request for anyone's input on that choice, however. 
> What I am trying to figure out is how to get the many customized preferences I have made over the years-- such as colors for specific accounts or the screen layout-- migrated from my Mac to the new OS. 
> I see from the wiki that there are basically four classes of supporting files location, although one (GTK_DATA_HOME) is blank in all OSes.
> I believe that I must copy the files I find in my Mac at these four locations into their correlating locations on the destination OS, (e.g., copy ~/Library/Application Support/Gnucash/.local/share/gtk3.0/settings.ini to c:\users\david\AppData\Local\gtk-3.0\settings.ini) to but I'd like confirmation that I have this right. 
> TIA,David T. 

David,

There are three pieces to that puzzle. The easier two are the application state and any Gtk styling that you've applied: Simply copy the files to the corresponding locations on the new system, according to the Configuration Locations wiki article. [1]

The third, preferences, is hard because all three platforms store their preferences in different ways. MacOS uses a special XML file called a Property List (located in ~/Library/Preferences/org.gnucash.gnucash). MS Windows uses the registry, and Linux uses an ini-style file in $XDG_HOME/dconf that appears to contain all of the preferences for all applications on the system. The piece of Glib that we use for that, GSettings [2], exposes no API for converting one to another. Each is a well-defined structure and since MacOS property lists are XML the logical tool to use for transformation is XSLT, but no pre-written "stylesheets" showed up when I googled.

Regards,
John Ralls

[1] https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Configuration_Locations
[2] https://developer.gnome.org/gio/stable/settings.html