[GNC] Preferences reset problem?

[John Ralls]

> On Jun 30, 2021, at 2:52 AM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> 
> Op dinsdag 29 juni 2021 22:22:36 CEST schreef incoming-gnucash at sabot.com:
>> After gnucash 4.5 was announced, I tested upgrading to it on a
>> standalone test machine (running flatpak on ubuntu 20.04), and
>> I encountered the issue later described here:
>> 
>>  https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=798194
>> 
>> where all my gnucash settings were lost.  On that same test machine, I
>> tried downgrading to 4.4, but my settings were still gone.  This
>> seemed kind of scary, so I put off upgrading my real machine pending a
>> fix.
>> 
>> I see that the bug report linked to above includes some manual
>> migration steps to export/re-import settings as a workaround, so I
>> plan to just go ahead and try that (and I will go direct from 4.4 to
>> 4.6, skipping 4.5).  But I thought I'd check in to make sure that
>> there was no other pending/better way or automatic approach to this,
>> or is the manual workaround the way to go?
>> 
> So far there's no better workaround. You can either manually set your 
> preferences again or use the command provided in the bug report.
> 
> The short version of the issue is that a flatpak install of gnucash is as if 
> you install gnucash on a different machine, completely isolated from your 
> normal environment. There used to be a convenience to share preferences 
> between your normal environment and that "virtual" flatpak machine. That 
> convenience was dropped recently by the flatpak developers (well, the gnome 
> runtime developers really). Instead they provide a means to automatically 
> import settings from your main environment to the flatpak "virtual" machine, 
> but for historical reasons this can't work with gnucash. So as for the 
> convenience of having your preferences magically available in the flatpak 
> environment we're stuck between a rock and a hard place unfortunately.
> 
>> If this issue affects all flatpak users, perhaps the release notes
>> should reference the preferences issue and describe or link to the
>> appropriate workaround?
> 
> That's a reasonable idea. I hope someone will do so.

Geert,

Can you elaborate on the historical reasons on https://github.com/flathub/org.gnucash.GnuCash/pull/43?

Regards,
John Ralls