[GNC] Gnucash logs

[D.]

Michael, 

I purposefully *didn't* say in this email "almost all users have only one set of books"; I said "I believe that many users only keep one set of books," and I very specifically noted that I do not have statistics regarding the uses to which gnucash is put. Neither do you. Your use experience and mine are different. Who's to say yours is more valid than mine? 

As for the problem itself, I didn't suggest per book log folders precisely because my use case doesn't need it, but once you raised it,  I made a logical amendment to the suggestion. Is there a problem with that solution? Your tone suggests that there is. 

David


-------- Original Message --------
From: Michael or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at comcast.net>
Sent: Tue Apr 28 22:11:04 GMT+05:30 2020
To: "D." <sunfish62 at yahoo.com>
Cc: Gnucash Users <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
Subject: Re: [GNC] Gnucash logs

On 4/27/2020 10:50 PM, D. wrote:
> Michael,
>
> I take your point; we users will often create duplicated file names for different content. I believe that many users only keep one set of books. I don't have any statistics on general GnuCash usage to be able to say whether more users have one file or many.
>
> However, given that operating systems prevent identical file names to coexist in a folder, it would seem to me that there is a simple remedy to overlapping log files: per book log folder settings. In your case, business1financials/ledger.gnucash would use business1financials/logs and organization1financials/ledger.gnucash would use organization1financials/logs
>
> Problem solved.
>
Yes, but that is solving the problem by a different method (not writing 
the log files to a dedicated directory for all log files but writing 
them into a subdirectory of the directory containing the data file). 
Would be easy for gnucash when starting to check for the existence of 
this subdirectory, if not there, create it. Much as it checks for the 
existence of a lock file.

Had THAT been suggested you would not have seen an objection from me. 
But about "almost all users have only one set of books" I have to laugh. 
If all those rare situations never existed, designing/writing software 
would be a snap. Software solution have to ALWAYS work. A commonly 
quoted rule of rule of thumb, 80% of the design/write time will be 
handling just 20% of the cases, but in my experience, 50% of the time 
will be handling those that are 1% or less.


Michael