Historically, GnuCash has always stored its user specific application data in ~/.gnucash based on old linux (unix ?) conventions.
This didn't work really well on Mac OS X/Quartz, so John has overridden this path on OS X to make more sense there. Now there's a bugreport that indicates this isn't the best place on Windows either [1]. I could override the path on Windows as well and be done with it, but in my investigation I found that even on linux ~/.<appname> is no longer the recommended place to store such information. According to the XDG Base Directory Specification [2] the preferred location is ~/.local/share/<appname>. The nice thing is, glib has a convenience function g_get_user_config_dir, which by default returns ~/.local/share on linux and the equivalent and proper ~\Application Data (Windows XP) or ~\AppData\Roaming (Windows Vista/7). I don't know what this routine returns on OS X, but I would expect it to return the proper location for user specific application data there as well. If not that should be reported as a bug againse glib on OS X. In this light I would like to update the GnuCash code to make use of the g_get_user_data_dir function on all platforms and rename the directory from .gnucash to gnucash. That would give a better experience on all platforms IMO. This is what the directories would become: - Linux: ~/.local/share/gnucash - Windows XP: c:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\gnucash - Windows Vista/7: c:\Documents and Settings\<user>\AppData\Roaming\gnucash - OS X: ? I would obviously have to provide some conversion code as well, that would copy the old .gnucash contents to .local/share/gnucash to guarantee continuity for the users. I also think this change may be better for 2.5/2.6 than 2.4.1. Does anyone have any objections to this ? Geert [1] see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=503722 [2] see http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-0.6.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
