[GNC] Correct environment variables for Linux?

[Dan Ståhlberg]

Thanks for the advice Geert!

I have tried setting GNC_CONFIG_DIR and GNC_DATA_DIR as well but get the same result. I guess it is gSettings/dconf that mess things up.

As this is 3.8b+ version (packaged in Ubuntu 20.04), I may revise my backup strategy and move on to 4.4 and flatpak instead. Sometimes it's not worth all the work, you just have to give in :)

Thanks anyway, I've learned a lot more about Gnucash and its' installation. One day I would like to try building and installing, and maybe contributing in some way. I guess it would be a good idea to set this up as a VM in VirtualBox or such, so you don't screw up your working environment (and accounting :)

Regards,
Dan

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Friday, January 8th, 2021 at 12:22, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:

> Setting XDG_DATA_HOME and XDG_CONFIG_HOME will affect more than just gnucash. It also affect many other parts of the gnome or kde desktop environments.
>
> If gnucash always starts as if it has never run before, it's most likely gnucash can't communicate with gsettings. Part of the gnucash settings are stored there. On linux dconf is used as backend for gsettings. It may well be dconf doesn't work properly if you change the above environment variables in a running linux session (be it gnome or kde or any other desktop environment).
>
> I would suggest setting GNC_CONFIG_DIR and GNC_DATA_DIR rather than the XDG_ environnment variables.
>
> In your scenario these could be set to:
>
> export XDG_DATA_HOME=$TOP/.local/share/gnucash
>
> export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$TOP/.config/gnucash
>
> Note that for a full backup you'll have to find a way to export the settings stored via gsettings as well. You could script something using "dconf dump" and "dconf load" to export or import settings trees from dconf.
>
> Regards,
>
> Geert