[GNC] Can't open old GnuCash file

[MegaBrutal]

Hello,

I've been using GnuCash between 2015 to 2017 to help to straighten out
my personal finances. Due to changes in my life, my transaction count
increased significantly which required more and more time to enter,
while I got less free time to do the accounting. Meanwhile, my
financial problems basically got resolved and my motivation to keep on
updating my GnuCash file dropped significantly.

Now I got a situation that I'm looking for certain transactions from
around that time and I remembered that I should check my old GnuCash
file, untouched since 2017-09-21. To my shock, the modern GnuCash
version that comes with my distro (Ubuntu 23.10) crashes when I try to
open my old file. Here is my GnuCash version and the backtrace I get:

---

GnuCash 5.3
Build ID: 5.3+(2023-06-26)

Backtrace:
In ice-9/boot-9.scm:
  1752:10  5 (with-exception-handler _ _ #:unwind? _ #:unwind-for-type _)
In unknown file:
           4 (apply-smob/0 #<thunk 7f192cf10360>)
In ice-9/boot-9.scm:
   2836:4  3 (save-module-excursion #<procedure 7f19170bcb80 at
ice-9/eval-string.scm:66:9 ()>)
In ice-9/eval-string.scm:
     38:6  2 (read-and-eval #<input: string 7f19170bae70> #:lang _)
In ice-9/eval.scm:
    619:8  1 (_ #(#<directory (gnucash utilities) 7f192cface60>
#<collectable-swig-pointer std::unique_ptr< GncOptionDB > *
563d43f24190>))
In unknown file:
           0 (GncOption-set-value #<pointer 0x563d43f29340> (absolute
1496181600 . 0))

ERROR: In procedure GncOption-set-value:
Wrong type (expecting exact integer): (1496181600 . 0)

Some deprecated features have been used.  Set the environment
variable GUILE_WARN_DEPRECATED to "detailed" and rerun the
program to get more information.  Set it to "no" to suppress
this message.

---

Maybe I was wrong that I expected some backward compatibility that
modern versions are capable of performing incremental updates to old
files to update it to the current file format... What to do now? Any
suggestions?


Best regards,
MegaBrutal