[GNC] gnucash 4.8 does not save settings

[Geert Janssens]

Hi Papa OZ,

I'd like to respond to the "developers have gone the gnucash route" remark.

That suggests the developers prefer the use of flatpaks over distro packages. As one of these 
developers (though less active these days) and the initiator of the flatpak for gnucash effort, 
I like to state that would be misleading.

Personally I don't have a preference per se. There are plenty of arguments for or against 
either approach and I think it's up to each individual user to make a choice based on what 
they consider most important.

The choice to introduce flatpaks comes from a very practical standpoint.

The situation is that the gnucash packages found in distributions have never been created 
by gnucash developers themselves. This has always been done by distro packagers. Due to 
the policies that each distribution has wrt updating packages, we are in a situation that 
distro packages often lag behind on gnucash releases. The lag ranges from a few weeks 
(good!) to a couple of years.

We can't and won't create up to date packages for all possible distros out there (in various 
formats like deb, rpm, arch-flavoured,...).

However we can provide a single up-to-date flatpak as an alternative that works on all 
distributions. So that's what we have done.

Users that have reasons to stick with their distro but want to have a newer gnucash than 
their distro ships by default now have an alternative that's likely easier to use than building 
from source.

But to each their own. If you prefer to stick with your distro package, by all means enjoy that 
version!


Should you choose to go with flatpak, I should address your question about sharing files.

Your data file is not stored in the sandbox. It will be somewhere in your home directory. So 
you should be able to share that without issues as you did before.

If you also shared config files or saved reports, they do indeed move to a different location. 
But that location is also accessible from outside the sandbox, so I expect you can share those 
as well, though maybe not via ordinary softlinks. The location of these configuration files 
however is controlled by two environment variables GNC_DATA_HOME and 
GNC_CONFIG_HOME. If you point these to a location outside of the typical in-sandbox 
locations, I expect you can share them as you like.

Hope that helps,

Geert

Op vrijdag 14 april 2023 15:51:08 CEST schreef Papa Oz:
> Hello, Carsten, and thanks for the reply.
> 
> Please forgive the anti-spam thing.  I had put @gnucash.org in my address
> book and I assumed all list-oriented traffic would come through their
> server.  Now that I see how it works I will probably have to change my
> registration to a different address that lacks the filtering.  Meanwhile
> you are "allowed".
> 
> All the files are within my home directory tree and I checked the
> permissions already.  There are some symlinks involved.  They work with 3.8
> but I suppose something might have changed in 4.8 such that they are a
> problem.
> 
> I did notice that the developers have gone the flatpak route.  I am not fond
> of flatpaks, which is why I mentioned deb in my post.  I suspect the
> sandbox aspect of flatpaks will give me some trouble sharing files between
> two systems.  But I guess I will have to add gnucash to my very small
> collection of flatpaks and figure out how to work out the sharing.
> 
> Thank you for your recommendation of 4.13.  I will give it a try.
> 
> -----Original Message-----