January 2018 - devel - lists.freelock.com

Adding to OpenBSD. Is this a good time now?
by chris＠bennettconstruction.us 19 Nov '24

19 Nov '24

A lot of Perl modules need to be imported into OpenBSD in order for it to be installable. I plan on asking for help to do this from OpenBSD users. It seems like LedgerSMB would now be a good import with all of the development of testing, etc. Are there any big changes on the immediate horizon for 1.5? I'm not running LedgerSMB because of the work that needs to be done first. As a side note, I am working on getting the forums back up, but $$ are a bit of a problem right now. Trying to find a baremetal server outside of the USA that I can afford hasn't been successful so far. I found one, but they charge $30 for remote access for 24 hours. I can't afford $90 a month, which is most of what I am finding. Thanks, Chris Bennett

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LedgerSMB 1.5.16 released
by Erik Huelsmann 28 Jan '18

28 Jan '18

The LedgerSMB development team is happy to announce yet another new version of its open source ERP and accounting application. The trial period of the 1.5-slim Docker image has been extended by one more release (due to practical reasons). This release contains the following fixes and improvements: Changelog for 1.5.16 * Properly compute the last cleared balance on reconciliation (Yves L, #3405) * Fix regression reports not showing (PDF, etc) download links (Erik H, #3408) * Fix typo in SQL Ledger upgrade code (Erik H, #3409) * Add French Chart of Accounts (Yves L) * Lift requirement to enter sensitive private data when creating users (Erik H) * Fix absolute [New] link on order, AR and AP pages (Erik H) * Support non-root hosting by using relative '/' to 'login.pl' redirect (Erik H) Erik H is Erik Huelsmann Yves L is Yves Lavoie For installation instructions and system requirements, see https://github.com/ledgersmb/LedgerSMB/blob/1.5.16/README.md The release can be downloaded from our download site at https://download.ledgersmb.org/f/Releases/1.5.16 The release can be downloaded from GitHub at https://github.com/ledgersmb/LedgerSMB/releases/tag/1.5.16 Or pulled from Docker Hub using the command $ docker pull ledgersmb/ledgersmb:1.5.16 These are the sha256 checksums of the uploaded files: 3b878c8430267b3d1c7ab1f4eee3f16c36b110047a7a67f6574351a62fee032a ledgersmb-1.5.16.tar.gz 485f405566556892700ca09cad4dd3fcea2e07b9a9bb65a1cec737e6b6bb744a ledgersmb-1.5.16.tar.gz.asc

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Release of ledgersmb-1.5 v1.5.15-1
by Robert J. Clay 10 Jan '18

10 Jan '18

An initial version of the Debian package of ledgersmb-1.5 for version 1.5.15-1 has been released and uploaded to our apt package repository for 'main'. It has also been uploaded to our PPA[2], for 'artful' (v17.10) as well as 'xenial (v16.04) and 'bionic (which will be v18.04); but due to an issue with the build farm at launchpad.net, they are not yet available and it is unclear when they will be. The packages at both our apt package repository and our PPA: ledgersmb-1.5 ledgersmb-1.5-apache ledgersmb-1.5-lighttpd ledgersmb-1.5-nginx ledgersmb-1.5-varnish -- Robert J. Clay rjclay(a)gmail.com, jame(a)rocasa.us GPG ID: 2448 3AE0 874D 8696 6DCD ECF4 198C AB6F 43B7 EA9A. [1] https://apt.ledgersmb.org/ [2] https://launchpad.net/~ledgersmb/+archive/ubuntu/main/+packages -- Robert J. Clay rjclay(a)gmail.com

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LedgerSMB 1.5.15 released
by Erik Huelsmann 07 Jan '18

07 Jan '18

The LedgerSMB development team is happy to announce yet another new version of its open source ERP and accounting application. As of this release, we're publishing a docker image based on the debian *-slim images, which reduces the Docker Hub reported size from 220MB (regular 1.5 image) to 150MB (slim image). When we don't get any negative feedback regarding the slim image, the next release will be based on that. This release contains the following fixes and improvements: Changelog for 1.5.15 * Generate access logs on standard output by default (Erik H) * Fix cli scripts; block running as root in PSGI instead of Sysconfig (Erik H) * Remove our moving out of SourceForge notice from the welcome page (Erik H) * Fix zero-value depreciations from blocking later depreciations (Chris T) * Be explicit about which Perl::Critic policies to apply in tests (Nick P) * Check for file errors when blacklist test (Nick P) * Make checks work (out of the box) with our Docker dev images (Nick P) Chris T is Chris Travers Erik H is Erik Huelsmann Nick P is Nick Prater For installation instructions and system requirements, see https://github.com/ledgersmb/LedgerSMB/blob/1.5.15/README.md The release can be downloaded from our download site at https://download.ledgersmb.org/f/Releases/1.5.15 The release can be downloaded from GitHub at https://github.com/ledgersmb/LedgerSMB/releases/tag/1.5.15 Or pulled from Docker Hub using the command $ docker pull ledgersmb/ledgersmb:1.5.15 Or pulled from Docker Hub, for the slim (150MB) image using $ docker pull ledgersmb/ledgersmb:1.5-slim These are the sha256 checksums of the uploaded files: 5555f5f894e9ecae11ce2ff93bd7ff557ce1d0952336781f6c34758992f557e3 ledgersmb-1.5.15.tar.gz 7693f4b178bc53010cc00190b03d33c84d9d0362aa24d678682c2ea1c40a0d34 ledgersmb-1.5.15.tar.gz.asc

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AR/AP Transaction entry UI: Changing dropdown to filtering select?
by Erik Huelsmann 07 Jan '18

07 Jan '18

Hi all, Traditionally, our software has offered a drop-down on the transaction entry screen to select the account to post the AR/AP amount on. However, since a number of years (since 1.3), we offer filtering selects on GL transaction entry and more recently (since 1.5), we offer filtering selects to select parts/services on an invoice. My thought today was that we probably want to change the regular dropdowns on the AR/AP transaction screen to filtering selects, at least as far as the cost/income accounts goes (I can imagine we don't want to change anything to the VAT/Tax accounts if it turns out to be complex to do, as there are usually only few of those and a dropdown doesn't mean too much searching around in the account list). Comments? -- Bye, Erik. http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP. Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.

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Year overview 2017
by Erik Huelsmann 04 Jan '18

04 Jan '18

It's becoming a tradition for me to write about the state of the community and what has been going on in the project at this time of year. This will be the third time to look back over the past year and look into what the next could bring. == Community interest == Last year, I expressed the hope and expectation that we'd be able to keep up the same speed of development. And while development progress has been good, we were not able to keep up with the current speed when measured in number of commits: the number of commits dropped significantly this year (as measured by OpenHUB). While the number here is probably skewed by the fact that only commits on the *master* branch are being counted (and thus commits on backport branches are discarded), there is probably some truth in these numbers. One of the other expectations expressed was that with fewer regressions, more energy could be spent on progressing actual development, allowing for more thorough refactoring as well as resolving some of the longer-standing bugs. This is exactly what happened: the last few releases in the 1.4 stable series fixed many long-standing bugs and annoyances. The lower number of commits can in part be explained by this trend: with attention for refactoring and "ways forward", there's been a need to spend time discussing next steps more than there ever was before. This year, same as last year, we've seen very high traffic in the LedgerSMB Matrix/FreeNode channel: the channel aggregates updates from GitHub, Travis CI and the ledgersmb.org site as well as facilitates discussion of every aspect of our community (from helping newbee users to discussing next steps on almost every aspect of the project). Another part of the slowed development is the fact that this year was - for our project - the all-time low in our relationship with SourceForge. We felt we were forced to close our project on the site and move all of our (remaining) use of it elsewhere. Fortunately, with the help of various core committee members, we were able to quickly round up download and mailing list services. SourceForge didn't want to provide us with the list of mail addresses that were subscribed to our lists, meaning we unfortunately had to start our lists from scratch again. == Releases == The project created 20 releases in 2017, meaning it matches 2016 in that respect: - 14 stable releases: 1.5.1 through 1.5.14 - 6 oldstable releases: 1.4.37 through 1.4.42 The 1.4 branch has reached EOL (End-Of-Life) and will not see further maintenance releases from the community. In order to help those who are stuck with 1.4 for a little while longer, the project fixed many of the longer-standing problems in the last releases before the EOL date. [Note: Should you be unable to migrate to 1.5 yet are running into problems, one of the commercial support suppliers will be glad to help you; see https://ledgersmb.org/topic/commercial-support] At the end of 2016, we agreed on a backport policy for new functionality, refactorings and any other changes that might not be low-impact. In 2017, we stuck to that policy, resulting in a very stable 1.5 experience so far. This year we tightly integrated updating the LedgerSMB Docker images <https://hub.docker.com/r/ledgersmb/ledgersmb/tags/> with the release of the source code tarball: now, when we a new release is generated (and announced), the Docker images will be ready for download as well. == Packaging and installation == This year, the 'ledgersmb' package has been superseeded by two packages, one named 'ledgersmb-1.4' the other named 'ledgersmb-1.5'. These packages' naming resemblance to PostgreSQL isn't accidental: like the PostgreSQL packages, they are meant to be run side-by-side to facilitate the upgrade path from 1.4 to 1.5. One thing to be very proud of in the area of packaging that we achieved this year: the size of the Docker images went down from original sizes 2.6+GB down to less than 250MB! This brings our images in line with what users would expect of a Docker images. == Development progress == Starting off with some statistics: Over the course of the year, 262 new issues were created (out of which 73 were enhancements, 10 were "design trackers" -- issues to discuss the design of future solutions) and 162 issues were closed; 620 pull requests were created and 630 pull requests closed. Sentiment is that the 1.5 release branch is doing well: issues being fixed are rather long standing problems inherited from 1.4 (or even 1.3) rather than regressions in the releases themselves. To that extent, the new backport policy proves useful in improving stable branch reliability. As a result, developers have been spending time working on the *master* branch more than in other years. While the user experience work and JavaScript developer that we expressed in 2016 we hoped to do in 2017, didn't materialize, a lot of code clean-up has gone into the *master* branch in 2017 in a variety of areas: - Removal of the need to have an 'Inventory Entity' (which used to be used for inventory adjustments) - Removal of the need to write all PSGI responses to files before being served to the web - Refactoring and code de-duplication in the template handling framework - Elimination of warnings and notes from the database creation process - Much stricter code checking using Perl::Critic - ... and many many more ... That said, there are still 5 issues considered blocking a 1.6 release (see the 1.6 milestone <https://github.com/ledgersmb/LedgerSMB/milestone/3> for more details). Last week we discussed how to approach these 5 blockers and "unblock" a release (which provides us with the option to release, not with the obligation!). As for the "MC" (multi-currency) branches, the time to merge these to the master branch doesn't seem right *before* a 1.6 release as the destabilization effect is currently being estimated too high a risk. One of the 5 blocking issues for 1.6 is also blocking bringing MC to master: it must be possible to develop a smooth schema upgrade process in order to support the schema changes required for MC. However, such tooling isn't currently in place. By releasing 1.6 with such tooling, we'll be able to build up some experience with it before stretching its use by running the MC upgrades on it. == New functionality and improvements == The most visible improvement in LedgerSMB itself is that inventory adjustments no longer need the inventory entity and that the adjustment process no longer generates invoices. The biggest improvements in the release process would be the integration of the Docker image. Other improvements include the harmonization between the SQL Ledger migrations from 2.8 and 3.0 into LedgerSMB 1.5 -- these now use a single process with a few conditional steps, instead of two separately coded processes. Last, but probably not least, we reorganized the source tree to set aside all code that we want to part with. As most of you will know, we have a part of the code base which is rather fragile. We want to remove that part of the code base by rewriting it. Until it's rewritten, we want to make sure it's touched as little as possible. Both goals are served by setting the code apart, by communicating clearly which code is slated for replacement. == Looking forward to 2018 == Over the past releases, we have been able to shorten the release cycle, quickly releasing functional changes relevant to some instead of holding releases long until it had changes relevant to all. In that light, the first half of 2018 hopefully brings us 1.6, which would mean another significant shortening of the release cycle. With a year of refactoring and stabilizing behind us and the more-than-1-year-old Pull Requests merged, the project is in a good position to finish some of our long-wanted projects <https://github.com/ledgersmb/LedgerSMB/projects> as well as some items on the roadmap <https://ledgersmb.org/content/roadmap>. Let me finish by wishing everybody in our community a very good 2018 and expressing that we'll find a fitting role for everybody who wants to contribute to our efforts! Be it in development, testing, translating, documenting, helping others or sponsoring development! -- Bye, Erik. http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP. Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.

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I now have a server for forums.ledgersmb.org
by Chris Bennett 02 Jan '18

02 Jan '18

It took more than one try, but I now have one. If the address can be pointed to: 104.217.196.253 including the MX too. That's a single IP, so I can add https later I finally got all the files that I was able to salvage from all over. Nothing lost but some of the conf's for Apache 2.4 and possibly some little change in some program file. I just need to do the server conf's again. Not the whole set, just the base conf's. I have everything else, which was a huge relief to not have lost a ton of work. If someone could respond to me at chris(a)bennettconstruction.us just so that I know message got to the mailing list. Sorry for the delays with this. Just had one problem after the next and I didn't catch that my server was removed by the company until too late (others had the same problem too). Chris Bennett

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