[GNC] Backporting Gnucash 3.7 to Ubuntu "Bionic" (or Mint, etc.)

[Tommy Trussell]

On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 2:16 PM Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be>
wrote:

> Op zaterdag 19 oktober 2019 22:37:40 CEST schreef Tommy Trussell:
> > On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 5:14 PM Jon Schewe <jpschewe at mtu.net> wrote:
> > > Note that you can also use flatpak to get it.
> > >
> > > sudo apt install flatpak
> > > flatpak install flathub org.gnucash.GnuCash
> >
> > Thank you for the reminder!
> >
> > The flatpak may work for some folks, and it is certainly easy to install.
> >
> > Sadly, the flatpak has some important disadvantages. It requires more RAM
> > (memory) to operate, which didn't work well on my older system with
> limited
> > RAM. I also had some issues with flatpak sandboxing -- I keep my GnuCash
> > data files stored in a way that were not accessible to the flatpak when I
> > tried. (Though I feel sure I can move the data files if I need to.)
> >
> I'm curious, what location was not available to flatpak ? It is limited by
> default but you should be able to grant it the proper permissions to
> access
> most locations.
>
> Geert
>

I did not try it much due to the memory limitations. However on that system
I have a "shared" directory symlinked out of the user's home directory to
another user directory where GnuCash and all other work-related files were
intended to be accessible to any of several users logging into the same
machine having "shared" group permissions. I set it up maybe ten years ago,
and in practice it hasn't been as useful, convenient or robust as I
imagined. But in the case of the GnuCash flatpak I tried, the symlinked
directories were not visible at all, and I didn't start tinkering with
permissions to see if I could make them work.

I recently got an email notice from Dropbox telling me they see I am using
symlinks and want me to know they are going to stop supporting symlinked
directories soon, so if I decide to keep using Dropbox I will probably need
to make some big changes anyway.

Eventually I'll upgrade to a system having a "modern" amount of RAM so
flatpak may become my preferred way to stay up-to-date on GnuCash. But for
now I also wanted to get it working on Ubuntu Bionic.