[GNC] Consistent way to hang Gnucash

Mon Aug 5 15:29:52 EDT 2024

Are you a genealogy addict too, John?

My late father was shown a tablet stone in the Old Portpatrick churchyard by his grandfather when he was a teenager. This took his ancestry back to one Thomas Margbanks (b abt 1567 d Aug 1637, and he was hooked for life.

I built a Nascom 2 Z80 machine in 1979, with Microsoft BASIC and a cassette tape drive, and by the time my dad retired in 1981 I had installed disc drives and had managed to get CP/M running on it, including a copy of dBase II. By this time he was finding the management of his data very cumbersome, and was in touch with the manager of the mainframe belonging to the local council in Morayshire, which he was allowed to use out-of-ours to process the punched cards he stored his family tree on. I wrote dBase programs to enter, store and process data in the same format as the punched cards, showed my father how to use it, and left him in charge of feeding the goldfish and other pets while we were away with the kids in the Mediterranean. By the time we got back he’d got hundreds of individuals into the database, but the goldfish died! By the time of his death in 2002 he’d gone from CP/M on Nascom, to CP/M on a machine called Matmos, and finally to Relativity on MS/DOS, from which I extracted the files in GEDCOM format to upload and manage in LifeLines.

It’s clear that my children are unlikely to follow me down the geekish trail to LifeLines, and I wss looking for something more user-friendly. During lockdown I came across WikiTree, and I’ve been steadily transferring several thousand individuals’ details, mostly using FamilySearch to collect the necessary source citations, along with FindAGrave and other free-to-access services.

Regards,

Michael

> On 5 Aug 2024, at 19:19, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
> 
> Michael,
> 
> Michael,
> 
> Lifelines. Wow. I learned a lot about the importance of not atomizing genealogy data and so losing the context from Tom Wetmore in the list discussions about the Gentech model when that came out. He was also a big help in shaping FamilySearch’s gedcomX standard 12 years ago.
> I just had a brief browse through https://github.com/lifelines/lifelines/tree/master. Looks like it was still being maintained until a couple of years ago. It’s an antiquated design that does a lot of stuff that was necessary in 1991 but bad practice by 1999 when Tom quit working on it. Too bad nobody’s given it the thorough overhaul it needs. Even so modern OS design makes it pretty unlikely that it could cause another program, never mind macOS, to crash. 
> 
> Regards,
> John Ralls
> 
>> On Aug 5, 2024, at 09:41, Michael Hendry <hendry.michael at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Thanks, John,
>> 
>> I’ve tried and failed to reproduce the problem starting from the .gnucash file I’d saved from before the crash.
>> 
>> My Mac had been running for several days with a lot of open apps, and it was around this time the Mac OS shut itself down and rebooted a couple of times for no apparent reason. I had been making extensive use of an open-source genealogy program from the 1980s called LifeLines, which required extensive modification for 64-bit operation. I suppose it’s possible that it was responsible.
>> 
>> I’ll upgrade to 5,8, and keep my eyes open for trouble.
>> 
>> Michael
>> 
>>> On 3 Aug 2024, at 17:54, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Michael,
>>> 
>>> No problem, life happens. If you have time please try to reproduce the crash and hang with the current 5.8 release. As usual the more detail you can provide to help me reproduce the problem the more likely it is that I’ll be able to  figure it out and fix it.
>>> 
>>> Regards,
>>> John Ralls
>>> 
>>>> On Aug 3, 2024, at 06:04, Michael Hendry <hendry.michael at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Sorry, John,
>>>> 
>>>> I failed to follow-through on this because of family illness. I did get as far as taking a backup of the Gnucash file from before the crash, so if it’s still relevant I can make time to experiment with it, but I see there were some problems with a more recent release, and it may be water under the bridge now.
>>>> 
>>>> Please let me know if it’s still worth reporting.
>>>> 
>>>> Regards,
>>>> 
>>>> Michael
>>>> 
>>>>> On 23 Jun 2024, at 17:41, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> I think you should open bugs for the crash and the hang, though I’m not sure that I can easily fix either of them.
>>>>> 
>>>>> The crash is clearly a call to g_strdup() with a nullptr, but I can’t figure out from the stack trace where that might be.
>>>>> 
>>>>> For the hang I take it that you’ve killed to two instances of GnuCash and started over, but from this letter that you can reliably reproduce the hang. I can’t with a simple book and a simple SX, so I’ll need more detail. It would be helpful if you can attach a spindump (select GnuCash in ActivityMonitor, in the toolbar click the circle with … in it and select Spindump from the resulting context menu) to the bug report.f
>>>>> 
>>>>> Are you closing the Scheduled Transaction Editor tab between uses or just clicking different SXes to edit?  While I’m able to edit two SXes at once it doesn’t seem from your description that that’s what you’re doing.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Regards,
>>>>> John Ralls
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Jun 23, 2024, at 08:12, Michael Hendry <hendry.michael at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Further to my recent crash report:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Start to reconcile a bank account.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Edit a pension payment during reconciliation because the regular payment has gone up
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Open the Scheduled Transaction editor and adjust for new payment.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Go on with the reconciliation until the next pension increase prompts the editing of a payment
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Try to open the Scheduled Transaction editor.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Work-around: Make a note of adjustments needed to Scheduled Transactions, and deal with them after the reconciliation is complete.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Michael
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Version Numbers here:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Process:               Gnucash [48185]
>>>>>> Path:                  /Applications/Gnucash 2.app/Contents/MacOS/Gnucash
>>>>>> Identifier:            org.gnucash.Gnucash
>>>>>> Version:               5.5-1 (5.5-1)
>>>>>> Code Type:             X86-64 (Native)
>>>>>> Parent Process:        launchd [1]
>>>>>> User ID:               501
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Date/Time:             2024-06-23 08:10:26.9458 +0100
>>>>>> OS Version:            macOS 14.5 (23F79)
>>>>>> Report Version:        12
>>>>>> Bridge OS Version:     8.5 (21P5077)
>>>>>> Anonymous UUID:        F889FA2B-0F71-CD50-6275-EA85633D47E5
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>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>> 
> 