On 2021-06-12 19:54, D. via gnucash-user wrote:

Jim,

I understand your complaint here, but it seems to me that the issue here is 
that MacPorts is prepending its directories into the environment path. Because 
they altered the path to prefer their own executables before the Apple supplied 
ones, gnucash-cli fails. …
That is true but incomplete. The other part of the situation is that GnuCash presents itself as two different executables, and in this case the OS provides those two executables with two different environments, and it leads to different behaviours by the two executables, which are baffling to the user. GnuCash could perhaps reduce the bafflement, in various ways.
…That doesn't seem to me to be a fault of Gnucash or its documentation.

Rather than "fault", I am thinking, what can GnuCash contribute to making this situation better for its users?

I submit that installing packages with MacPorts or Homebrew has aspects of installing application software, as well as aspects of altering the OS. Installing application software is a reasonable thing for people to do with their personal computers. I don't think its reasonable to say that GnuCash should ignore the existence of MacPorts and Homebrew.

Does this situation ever occur on Linux?  Do any Linux package managers install a second instance of perl, which gnucash-cli picks up differently than the GnuCash GUI does?

There are precedents for GnuCash adding code to achieve success despite a complex environment, and to give good diagnostics when a failure happens anyway. There is certainly precedent for GnuCash documentation helping users understand those failures and work around them.

      —Jim DeLaHunt

David


-------- Original Message --------
From: Jim DeLaHunt <[email protected]>
Sent: Sat Jun 12 21:31:41 EDT 2021
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [GNC] gnucash-cli says, "No quotes retrieved. Finance::Quote isn't 
installed properly" on macOS

On 2021-06-12 09:13, John Ralls wrote:

On Jun 12, 2021, at 12:22 AM, Jim DeLaHunt <[email protected]> wrote:

OK, I can understand that the MacPorts installation of perl may be configured 
to look for perl packages in MacPorts locations, and ignore the system 
locations. But I don't understand wny the GUI app of GnuCash apparently can 
find Finance::Quote when run from the GUI, but the gnucash-cli app apparently 
cannot. What is different?
Because applications started by LaunchServices don't get the environment from 
your shell's startup files. That means GnuCash is running /usr/bin/perl, not 
/opt/local/bin/perl but when you run a program from Terminal the environment is 
read so gnucash-cli runs /opt/local/bin/perl.
Thank you, John, this explanation is very helpful. I can understand that
the GnuCash GUI and the gnucash-cli experience different environments,
especially different $PATH values, because the OS invokes them in
different environments.

But I find it very confusing to have gnucash-cli be presented as an
integral part of GnuCash, and all the references to a singular action of
"update Finance::Quote on the system", then have gnucash-cli behave
differently and require a different installation of Finance::Quote than
the GnuCash GUI.

It seems to me that if both gnucash-cli and the GnuCash GUI would invoke
the perl executable at an absolute path, then they would have consistent
behaviour. Thus I wonder why GnuCash lets the environment find the perl
executable.

I have filed Bug 798209, "gnucash-cli might not use the same perl and
Finance::Quote as GnuCash GUI",
<https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=798209> , to track this.

My workaround as a MacPorts user: install Finance::Quote into the
MacPorts perl environment:

```
% port install p5-finance-quote
````

     —Jim DeLaHunt

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