[GNC] Symbolic links (MacOSX)

[Peter S. Shenkin]

Hi,

I'm getting back to gnucash after a long hiatus. I'm also starting up using
Gnucash on a different computer. So I copied the Gnucash directory to
~/Documents/work/Foo/ on the new computer. (The name Foo was changed to
protect the innocent. Or is it the guilty?)

Gnucash had been in ~/work/Foo on the old computer, so set up a symbolic
link in ~/work called Foo pointing to ~/Documents/work/Foo. To my surprise,
I got a msg that Gnucash couldn't parse the URL, and another, after
dismissing that dialog, that Gnucash could not open the file.

Eventually, as kind of a Hail-Mary pass, I replaced the symlink with an
actual copy (cp -pR) of the Foo directory from ~/Documents/work to ~/work,
and then Gnucash could read it.

This struck me as extremely bizarre. I have two questions.

   - Can Gnucash really not read through symlinks on MacOS?
      - Note that my Privacy settings allow Gnucash to read the ~/Documents
      directory, to which the symlink points.
      - In retrospect, I guess I should have tried using a MacOS "alias"
      instead of a symlink, but I don't know if that would have worked
any better.
      - There is nothing in Privacy to specify that Gnucash can read ~ or
      ~/work, but apparently this is not needed.
   - Suppose I now want to tell Gnucash to use the data in
   ~/Documents/Foo/Gnucash. Is there a way for me to do this without losing my
   history? (Or my sanity?)

Thanks,
-P.