[GNC] Settings not respected

[john]

> On Dec 24, 2022, at 11:06 AM, Jeff <jffry at posteo.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi Michael,
> 
> Thanks for the reply.
> 
> On 24/12/2022 17:57, Michael or Penny Novack wrote:
>> The "what happened" is obvious, no longer accessing the files where this information is stored (note recent discussions about where these are with regard to back-up). You are back to the defaults.
> 
> I had guessed that, but it doesn't matter what I then change, I still get the defaults. So some part of the settings system is broken.

The prefs are managed by dconf and I think on Linux it needs a dbus daemon running. The latter's logs go in /var/log/daemon.log; I'd expect the GLib gconf frontend errors to show up in the trace file.

> 
>> The "what caused it" not so obvious, and on that depends whether you can recover or will have to recreate.
> 
> I've got back-ups (I hope).

Don't hope, test. Try restoring from backup. Since you're on a frequently changing distro you should do that fairly often.

> 
>> You are NOT telling us what happened in between the last use of gnucash (when it was working) and this event of a couple days ago. WHAT did you change on your computer?
> 
> I'm on Debian testing, so although gnucash itself wasn't upgraded, plenty of others have been in the last couple of days.
> 
> Python 3.9->3.10 was the only one I could see that was directly used by gnucash.
> 
> I had also installed the -dev packages for gtk4, but gnucash uses gtk3, doesn't it?

GnuCash doesn't use Python for anything interesting. There are bindings so that you can write Python programs that use the GnuCash API and there's a very rudimentary Python console so that you can use those bindings to interact with the current GnuCash session.

GnuCash does indeed use Gtk3, but even if you'd installed the dev package for that it wouldn't change anything. It's probably too soon for testing to have upgraded to Gtk 3.24.36 as it was released last Thursday. 3.24.35 was released Nov. 4 so that's probably been on your system for a month. It doesn't have anything to do with preferences anyway except to draw the Preferences dialog. GLib is the Gnome library that provides the preferences, but it's not likely to have updated yesterday either because 2.75.1 released on Wednesday and 2.75.0 released on Nov. 10.

Regards,
John Ralls