At startup, gnucash sets a number of environment variables based on the contents of the environment configuration file found in <prefix>/etc/gnucash.

Some of these parameters are required to properly work when not installed in the linux default /usr environment. For example, the gsettings schemas are not found unless this environment file has been parsed.

The python bindings currently don't load these settings and hence run into the above issue.

That can easily be fixed by exposing the functions that parse the environment file to python and run those functions in the python initialization code.