With the new year just started, it's time to provide an overview of what
our community has achieved over the past year. At the end of last
year, I wished everybody a healthy and prosperous 2024 and now
is a time to look back and see how we did.
== Community interest ==
The website seems to generate roughly the same amount of interest as
earlier years; with 10% more hits than last year, there's really no evidence
of change in interest either way (up or down). From the increase in number
of Stars on GitHub (Stars went up from 360 on 25 February 2024 to 432
today - in line with the increase last year), we can conclude that there
is still interest in the project. This is supported by the fact that we see
new people attend the ledgersmb chat channel on Matrix, with many
contributing their bugs and experience.
Over 2024, I added release notifications through various social channels
hoping to attract interest from additional sources; release notifications
were posted to:
* Mastodon
* freshcode.club
* Facebook
* LinkedIn
* Twitter
Additionally, I've been responding on Reddit to inquiries of people who
want to self-host their accounting. The efforts have resulted in
significantly
more hits on our site from other sources than GitHub and search engines.
== Releases ==
With the release of 1.12.0 on 14 December 2024, we didn't quite realize
our goal to release 1.12 close to a year after 1.11 (03 October 2023). With
releases in the third quarter, we aim to provide mature software before
year-end -- when most companies close their books. We didn't let ourselves
be pressured by the delay, keeping focus on releasing high quality software.
We were able to include a sizeable list of new functionalities, changes and
(code) cleanups through 835 commits, 622 files changed, 175,155 added
lines and 136,214 removed lines of code (and comments) between 1.11.0
and 1.12.0.
With 23 releases across 3 maintenance branches in 2024, the project was
a bit quieter than 2023; mostly because periods between bug reports have
increased -- some months no bugs were reported; something that hasn't
happened before in my 10 years of contribution to the project:
1.10 (10): 1.10.29 - 1.10.38
1.11 (12): 1.11.8 - 1.11.19
1.12 (1): 1.12.0
Which excludes the alpha, beta and release candidate releases.
All releases included Docker container images for 32-bit ARM (ARM/v7),
64-bit ARM (ARM64) and 64-bit Intel (AMD64), which can be run on
a wide variety of ARM devices, including Raspberry Pi's.
== Development progress ==
This year saw lower numbers of commits than last year. Although the
number of commits was lower, the number of pull requests (597) is
much lower than last year (736) which is probably a combination of
not opening a separate PR for every little thing and a period of
slower development in the second half of the year.
The number of active developers - derived from accepted
commits - was lower than last year (6) by 1 (5 this year).
This year, too, we were able to close a long-standing
bug, continuing last year's focus to close issues in the
7-year-and-older range:
* #2162: Aging statement shows local currency for foreign currency invoices
(regressed in 2016)
Project commits on all branches (excluding merges):
538 Erik Huelsmann
32 Yves Lavoie
4 Neil Tiffin
6 Walid Mujahid
2 Christian Eriksson
By comparison, these are the figures for 2023:
672 Erik Huelsmann
72 Yves Lavoie
15 Aung Zaw Win
6 Christian Eriksson
6 Neil Tiffin
1 John Locke
Please note that the number of commits is in no way a measure of time
spent on the project. Also note that these numbers don't include the
time spent by those taking the effort to report their problems and
taking the time to respond to developer questions as well as helping
to test solutions when developers think they solved the problem.
Similarly, there was a lot of activity with respect to issues:
Number of open issues at 2024-01-01: 117
of which remain open today: 101
Issues closed: 60
of which created before 2024-01-01: 16
Issues created: 65
of which still open: 21
Number of open issues today: 122
This amount of development activity triggers many CI/CD jobs. To run
our test workloads, we have been using GitHub Actions as well as
CircleCI, each set up to test different aspects.
The 122 issues that are open today summarize into these statistics:
* 5 bite-sized: issue ideal to start with our code base
* 7 help-wanted: these are issues we need someone to get involved
* 5 sponor-wanted: these will be developed when someone helps out by
footing bills
* 65 type:enhancement: generally requests for new or improved features
* 17 type:bug
(Note that an issue may fall into more than one category or none at all.)
== New functionality and improvements ==
1.12 improves on 1.11's use of workflows by moving reconciliations to the
same
infrastructure. The implementation of workflows for AR/AP transactions is
now used
to show an audit trail. It also adds an audit trail - which can be
inspected from
setup.pl - for database upgrades, including feedback to administrators when
an
upgrade requires additional action (this implements #8363). Substantial
work has
been done on improving database upgrades even including upgrades from 1.3;
this shows the project's commitment to help all users moving to new and
supported
versions, even if they are on long-unsupported versions.
== Helping SQL-Ledger users migrate ==
The project is looking for SQL Ledger users who want to migrate to LedgerSMB
to test and improve the migration procedure, now that new development
of SQL-Ledger seems to have stalled.
== Looking forward to 2025 ==
In 2025, we'll likely release 1.13 around the third quarter;
again in a release cycle a bit shorter than a year. This year the
1.11 release branch will reach End-Of-Life status on 03 October.
And last but not least, I'm hoping for 1 or 2 new contributors (not
necessarily developers: translators, testers, documentation writers or
UI artists are all greatly appreciated!). If you want to contribute,
but don't know where to start, please contact me.
== In closing ==
Thanks to everybody who contributed to any of the above in any way,
especially to
Neil Tiffin for taking the time to discuss (and thereby sharpen) planned
changes and helping out with documentation-writing
Computerisms.ca for hosting our DNS
Freelock.com for hosting our website and mailing lists
Efficito.com for hosting our mailing list archive, apt repository,
release and download server
GitHub.com, CircleCI and coveralls.io for hosting our development workflow
My special personal thanks go to my GitHub Sponsors for supporting me
for time, efforts and (financial) resources dedicated to the project!
Leaves me only to wish everybody in our community - and their loved
ones - a safe and productive 2025!
--
Bye,
Erik.
http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP.
Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.
