On woensdag 23 augustus 2017 23:21:23 CEST John Ralls wrote: > A new default should apply only to new installations and should be > overridden by $GNC_DOT_DIR and $AQBANKING_HOME; we should continue to > include ~/.gnucash and ~/.aqbanking in the default search and use the first > instance of the config file we find. > While that is conservative and safe, it would also require us to support the outdated directories forever and by extension make our code more complicated for that same period. So I'm not in favor of this strategy.
And I'm not the only one. I have come across several applications in my long use of linux that have chosen not to do that either. Two come to mind immediately: libreoffice has changed user data directories with every major release for as long as I have used it. It has always copied the old one and didn't even bother telling the user about this. KMail did a similar migration twice, and informed the me about it on each occasion. So I think to point of view to take here is gnucash 2.8 is a new application that knows how to import settings from an older application (which happens to be gnucash 2.6 or older). At some point in the future nobody will still be using the old application at which point the user can decide to drop the configuration that old app used (I think nobody does that in real life though). I agree an override option should exist indeed. Not in the least because you're using it on OS X :) On the other hand I think GNC_DOT_DIR is tied way too much to the old directory format and I prefer to change it to GNC_DATA_HOME (as GNC_HOME is already in use to point at the base installation directory). > The XDG environment variables are appropriate in the Gnome and KDE desktop > environments on Linux and pretty much nowhere else. Perhaps the best > approach would be to set reasonable defaults per OS and allow them to be > overridden with a CMake variable and configure argument. > The per OS defaults are a good suggestion. On linux and compatible that is XDG_DATA_HOME/Gnucash, on Windows CSIDL_APPDATA\Gnucash. I'm only missing this on OS X. Is there a function in the Quarz framework that would return ~/ Library/Application Support/ so a similar default path can be created ? I'd want the defaults to be such that no environment variable should be set to get them. About the override in Cmake or configure, I doubt that makes much sense. These directories have no use during build, only at runtime*. And at runtime they can be overridden by GNC_DATA_HOME and AQBANKING_HOME. Geert * Strictly speaking I should say "should have no use during build". Unfortunately compiling the guile sources will cause the user_data_dir functions to be run. It's guile's way of evaluating whether dynamically loaded modules won't call other guile sources that need to be compiled :( I'm still evaluating whether this is bad for my new code or not. _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
