August 2019 - devel - lists.freelock.com

Call for translations / preparations of 1.7.0 release
by Erik Huelsmann 28 Aug '19

28 Aug '19

Hi all, With LedgerSMB 1.7.0-beta1 out for nearly 2 months now and without significant findings so far, the project team has started the final release process. This mail is both to announce that we're expecting to release 1.7.0 in a few weeks as well as a request for contributions: if you would like to donate to our community and don't know how? Translating LedgerSMB to a language you know will be of great help! Getting started with translating is as easy as creating an account on Transifex (https://transifex.com) and joining the LedgerSMB project there ( https://www.transifex.com/ledgersmb/ledgersmb/dashboard/). Your updated translations will automatically be included in all releases where applicable (from the latest 1.7 to any releases further 1.6 and 1.5 releases yet to come). The 1.7 release mainly features multiple currency rates per currency per day. Other development effort has been spent in building more tests so that test coverage has increased from 29% at the time of the 1.6.0 release (May 2018) to 41% on the 1.7.0-beta1 release. Regards, -- Bye, Erik. http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP. Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.

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LedgerSMB 1.6.11 released
by Erik Huelsmann 18 Aug '19

18 Aug '19

The LedgerSMB development team is happy to announce yet another new version of its open source ERP and accounting application. This release contains the following fixes and improvements: Changelog for 1.6.11 * Add CSS indentation to hierarchical financial statements (Erik H) * Fix random setup.pl errors due to assumed-available credentials (Erik H) * Fix failure in setup.pl when initial user exists in the database (Erik H) * Fix SQL Ledger version-comparisons when upgrading to LedgerSMB (Yves L) * Fix regression when running in a schema other than 'public' (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/1.6.11/README.md The release can be downloaded from our download site at https://download.ledgersmb.org/f/Releases/1.6.11 The release can be downloaded from GitHub at https://github.com/ledgersmb/LedgerSMB/releases/tag/1.6.11 Or pulled from Docker Hub using the command $ docker pull ledgersmb/ledgersmb:1.6.11 These are the sha256 checksums of the uploaded files: 61d41b0ba75c80ce99108b0c6bdf06d9f9b95833397ecb29b6dea087c70a8b67 ledgersmb-1.6.11.tar.gz b525207d5fdd23f325e08059c155293b1fc3e0ab26b6d98efff77328dc2ef273 ledgersmb-1.6.11.tar.gz.asc

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LedgerSMB 1.5.25 released
by Erik Huelsmann 18 Aug '19

18 Aug '19

The LedgerSMB development team is happy to announce yet another new version of its open source ERP and accounting application. This release contains the following fixes and improvements: Changelog for 1.5.25 * Fix regression when running in a schema other than 'public' (Erik H) Erik H is Erik Huelsmann For installation instructions and system requirements, see https://github.com/ledgersmb/LedgerSMB/blob/1.5.25/README.md The release can be downloaded from our download site at https://download.ledgersmb.org/f/Releases/1.5.25 The release can be downloaded from GitHub at https://github.com/ledgersmb/LedgerSMB/releases/tag/1.5.25 Or pulled from Docker Hub using the command $ docker pull ledgersmb/ledgersmb:1.5.25 These are the sha256 checksums of the uploaded files: 60bf5520a10f870d5c9f2b0ce620262f376fcc986011d6e00fc21ac6e8fd87a0 ledgersmb-1.5.25.tar.gz 369da04c42cb94888e48b4db3c41a2f376ae5fbd9695041bcfee14d7d3173eba ledgersmb-1.5.25.tar.gz.asc

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Dancer2 vs Plack::Request+Router::XS+Middlewares+TemplateToolkit+Beam::Wire ?
by Erik Huelsmann 06 Aug '19

06 Aug '19

Hi, Last year, I started experimenting with Dancer2 (one of the options on the table for our target framework when we rewrite much of our code). Today, I've been updating that code to the HEAD of the current master branch. During the work I've done so far (last year and today), I've come across several obstacles which now lead me to bring up the following for discussion. So, let me start by stating which problem I think we're looking to solve: we need a means to do request parameter handling, session management, pluggable authentication, routing, management, template handling and abstraction of a templating library. During my experiments with Dancer2, I found that indeed it provides a framework with the desired properties. However, as with other frameworks, Dancer2 imposes its "framework structure" on applications. Normally this helps simplify the task of application development. Yet with the peculiarities in our code base, I'm finding that to implement required functionalities, I'm already working against the framework rather than with it: 1. Session management (cookies) As part of the move from our current design to the Dancer2 framework, I'm aiming for setup.pl and login.pl to become completely separate applications, meaning that they require separate authentication cookies (to allow separate, concurrent logins into both apps from a single browser) While Dancer2 does support multiple apps running on a single instance of its framework (such as required to run login.pl and setup.pl from the same backend), it doesn't support - in its configuration file (config.yml) - that these apps use disjoint session management cookies. In order to support this use-case, I've had to add request hooks, changing the name of the session cookie on a per-request basis. 2.Pluggable authentication As LedgerSMB uses a rather unusual authentication scheme where the user+password+database name are required for login, our authentication scheme doesn't fit the standard set by the framework (Dancer2::Plugin::Auth::Extensible::*), I've ended up hacking "deep" into the internals of auth::extensible: our authentication couldn't be achieved without replacing the login templates and finding ways to make more parameters available than supported out of the box. 3. Templating library abstraction While abstraction from templating libraries sounds nice, in practice it's cumbersome to switch templating libraries: on the Perl side the abstraction works fine to swap from one to another, but templating libraries usually use different templating "languages" (i.e. TemplateToolkit uses different directives and paradigms than XSLate). So, it seems that managing instantiation of the templating library is more important than abstracting it. 4. Route definition & dispatch With the ability to define routes, we'll be able to detach URL structure from our internal code structure. Dancer2 has a nice DSL to support the definition of routes for non-webservice entry points. There are plugins available to extend the DSL with convenience keywords for definition of webservice entry points. However, the syntactic sugar provided by the endorsed plugin (Dancer2::Plugin::REST) provides 1 new DSL keyword which is nothing more than a way to attach 4 functions to a resource (create, get, update, delete) providing a generated route for each; I see very little benefit to this plugin. In addition, this plugin doesn't support HTTP's content negotiation; instead, it expects the requested resource to have an "extension" to indicate the desired response encoding (e.g.: /users/1.json returns JSON, /users/1.xml returns XML, etc). This isn't "http-native" enough for me and thereby unacceptable for our use. Then there's the (not endorsed) Dancer2::Plugin::WebService; however, this too encodes the desired response encoding in the URL... 5. Framework configuration Dancer2 supports running multiple "apps" on a single instance. We want to run multiple apps: our setup.pl and login.pl. Even: we want these multiple apps to run on different authentication domains (i.e. when a user is logged in in /login.pl, we don't automatically want the user to be logged in into /setup.pl too). During my experiments I found that this isn't something that Dancer2 supports in its configuration: it can be "tricked" to support it by installing the correct pre- and post-request hooks in the framework, but out-of-the-box, it's not there. I'm not sure what other areas this will affect in the future, but from the structure of the configuration, I'm imagining it'll be an issue in many places. So what is our way forward then? Well, while we were working to merge the Multi Currency branch and stabilizing the 1.7 release (this process is still on-going), I've been looking around for solutions to these issues and I think the Perl library ecosystem has very nice options for almost all of the problems mentioned above, with the remark that there will obviously not be such a nice DSL as there will be with Dancer2. The following alternatives are available: 1. For session management using encrypted cookies, there's Session::Storage::Secure which works and is agnostic of underlying technology 2. For pluggable authentication, as we need to write our own authenticator anyway (and we actually already *have* that as a Plack middleware), I there's no effort if we can reuse that 3. For templating engine abstraction, well, I guess that with my line of reasoning above, there's little reason to have abstraction for templating engines at all (I mean, there *is* for a framework which needs to support many code bases, but there isn't for our specific use-case: our code base) 4. Route definition and dispatch (including extraction of route parameters) is available in a technology agnostic library Router::XS; while this library doesn't have the solid DSL that Dancer2 has, I'm expecting us to move more and more to Webservice entrypoints (either JSONRPC, GraphQL or REST) meaning that the DSL Dancer2 provides will be far less useful as stated above 5. Framework configuration could be handled through one of the regular YAML libraries, but even better - especially with inversion of control / dependency injection - we could turn to Beam::Wire and be able to deal with the most complex configurations by deferring configuration handling to sysadmins Obviously, Dancer2 will be able to do request parameter handling. That's something that's supported today too: we already have Plack::Request to handle parameter parsing (both URL and body parameters). So, after this long story, I'm wondering if moving to Dancer2 is worth it, or that we can simply stay on Plack with its middlewares and put the aforementioned modules to good use. Lets have your opinions and a good discussion on the matter so we lay a strong foundation for next steps for our project. Regards, -- Bye, Erik. http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP. Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.

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