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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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Test coverage milestone
by Erik Huelsmann 21 Jul '19

21 Jul '19

Hi all, Roughly 4,5 years after the first coverage test run (12 September 2014) and little over 3 years after the first BDD test runs with coverage testing, on April 12th, we have finally reached the 40% coverage milestone demonstrating the effectiveness of the BDD tests to increase coverage. To get to this point, we contributed to or even created various other Perl project: * Test::BDD::Cucumber (bugfixes, plugin-capability, "prove" integration) * Weasel (Web-app and Single Page App testing) * Pherkin::Extension::Weasel (Weasel integration with Test::BDD::Cucumber) The most recent addition here - added in March - was the ability to generate an HTML log with screenshots of the web session; for an example of such logs, including screenshots of the application after execution of the various test steps, see https://132-18471236-gh.circle-artifacts.com/0/tmp/artifact/logs/index.html All of these contributions helped to accelerate the release schedule of LedgerSMB with fewer reported new issues on each release. With the size of our current test suite, we were running into limitations of Travis CI, with our test suite now approaching maximum run time for a test job. Over the past months, we've therefore been working to move part of our test suite to CircleCI. As part of this migration, we've been confronted with many timing issues which made our test suite produce more than acceptable false-negatives (but never false positives, fortunately). We've addressed all known instability issues now and moved testing of our master branch to run both on TravisCI and CircleCI. Our test coverage measurements (the slowest part of our tests) is produced on CircleCI and published on Coveralls.io ( https://coveralls.io/github/ledgersmb/LedgerSMB?branch=master) With the improved testing in place, I've been able to clear my backlog in old and pending changes. In the immediate future, new releases of Pherkin::Extension::Weasel and various Weasel::* modules are to be expected -- improvements to further help developer efficiency. Apart from work on expanding the test suite itself, Yves and I are likely to start moving our test suite from 'prove' to 'yath' ( https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/Test2-Harness/scripts/yath) because it deals with UTF-8 from the start, where we're currently seeing warnings from 'prove' relating to UTF-8. Regards, -- Bye, Erik. http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP. Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.

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migration from App X
by Andre Steenkamp 02 Jul '19

02 Jul '19

Hi Folks, I'm a LedgerSMB noobie. I have installed LedgerSMB and Postgres in Docker successfully (using docker-compose with modified yml file) with port 5432 open to the db so I can address the Db directly. The install works as expected (just had to set users passwords twice). What I would like help with is either some code to migrate from Sage to LedgerSMB or just some code or point me to some docs to get me started, please - I'm fluent in Java, some C++ and its been about 4 years since I seriously coded in Perl. -- *Regards,* *Andre Steenkamp* Primal Factors Consulting MBA International Business Bsc. Computer Science / Engineering SA Mobile: +27828781465 USA Mobile: +12627325285 Skype: andre.steenkamp

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LedgerSMB 1.7.0-beta1 released
by Erik Huelsmann 01 Jul '19

01 Jul '19

Hi, After the release of 1.7.0-alpha1 we have been working towards the 1.7.0 release as described in our community update. We feel that the 1.7.0 branch is feature complete and while we're developing tests to find and fix possible regressions and older bugs, no new features or major changes are expected to be implemented before 1.7.0. This means that the current code base (modulo any and all regressions we can find and fix) will become 1.7.0 when it's ready. To help you find the bugs we need to fix before the release, we have published 1.7.0-beta1. It's available as a Docker image from Docker Hub under the tag "ledgersmb/ledgersmb:1.7.0-beta1". See https://hub.docker.com/r/ledgersmb/ledgersmb/builds/ Additionally, the release can be downloaded as a tarball from the download site: https://download.ledgersmb.org/f/Beta%20Releases/1.7.0-beta1/ Please report any issues you find in reply to this e-mail (that is, to the mailing list) or create an issue on GitHub with your finding: https://github.com/ledgersmb/LedgerSMB/issues/new?template=ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md -- Bye, Erik. http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP. Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.

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LedgerSMB community update
by Erik Huelsmann 01 Jul '19

01 Jul '19

Hi, It was just before New Year when I sent out the last community update, so it's time for a follow up. This half year, we only released 1 maintenance release for 1.6.10. With no specific new bug reports coming in, the development team was able to focus its efforts on 1.7.0. On that front, a lot of development effort has gone into getting the Multi-Currency branch ready to be merged to master. On January 20th the long-awaited multi-currency branch merge happened, followed by the release of 1.7.0-alpha1. Since then, we've been developing more tests simulating user interaction with LedgerSMB to ensure that 1.7.0 will be as good as 1.6.0 when it is released. In the process, we have been fixing a few regressions. With the additional tests - which include tests for AR & AP invoices and transactions - we have increased test coverage from 29% (current on 1.6) to 40% (on master) and we're working to increase the number to well above 50% before release. The speed at which we're able to implement new tests is severely impacted by the fact that we hit a continuous integration limit: Travis CI allows us to run tests for a maximum of 50 minutes. Our test suite runs between 40 and 45 minutes in code-coverage testing mode. A lot of effort has gone into working on this problem. We're working to off-load the code-coverage test jobs to another Continuous Integration service (CircleCI) which *does* allow jobs to run longer than 50 minutes. Another direction of research was to reduce execution time of our test jobs. And while that did turn up some bugs in our Selenium test driver, it mainly helped the area where we didn't experience any problems (the non-code-coverage tests were reduced from 29-30 minutes of execution to 20-21 minutes of execution). Migrating some of our test infrastructure to CircleCI turned out to have the additional benefit of being able to start running our tests against Chrome and Firefox. Currently we only run against PhantomJS. While PhantomJS implements enough of JavaScript to support our testing, it's unmaintained and getting behind on recent standards. Being able to test with Chrome and Firefox will help to take advantage of more modern browser development techniques. As part of our optimization work, we helped create new releases of Weasel, Pherkin::Extension::Weasel and Test::BDD::Cucumber, where significant new features were added to Pherkin::Extension::Weasel to support increased developer efficiency. Looking to the immediate future, we're expecting to release 1.7.0-beta1 this week: we think 1.7.0 is feature complete and we'll work simply to stabilize it from here on. This means that 1.7.0 isn't production ready, but we're looking for people to test-drive it and value any and all bug reports we can get! Regards, Erik. -- Bye, Erik. http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP. Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.

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I have been held up when I discovered the lack of Docker in OpenBSD
by Chris Bennett 12 Apr '19

12 Apr '19

Hi, I've kinda disappeared for awhile because OpenBSD does not support Docker. Just as I was ready to get started, I ran into that problem right away. I have meant to send an email about that, but I was rather frustrated with the problem. I also intended to help with the Spanish translations. And didn't. The good news on that, I did find a Spanish/English dictionary specifically for business terms only. That's not a book I expected to find, much less expect to exist. As far as OpenBSD, I need to do lot of work on that. Could someone recommend a Linux distribution that works well that I can install and look at as an example as I work? What is the situation with browsers? I use mostly Firefox, but I'm finding more and more sites that really run off of only Chromium properly. Where are the right repositories located for development at? OpenBSD is running PostgreSQL 10.5 (or later when -current is released soon). Any issues with that or later versions of PostgreSQL? I discovered that some work was started on Docker by someone else quite a while back, but has not been worked on any further. I'm a little bit unclear on exactly what Docker is doing and not doing. I will spend some time looking into that. What is it doing in particular for LedgerSMB and just for this project only, can some kind of temporary workaround be used? Can I go ahead and port all of the missing modules and pass/fail the existing tests until something can be done about the Docker problem? OpenBSD has recently done a lot of work to make porting much easier to do. I do see that a lot of projects are using Docker, so it may be worth the effort to get it working in OpenBSD. People are using it with an Alpine Linux vmm from OpenBSD, but I have no experience in that. Chris Bennett

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LedgerSMB packages in Debian
by Robert J. Clay 06 Apr '19

06 Apr '19

Note that due to illness; although I updated our 'ledgersmb-1.6' pkg for v1.6.10 I haven't yet updated the 'ledgersmb' pkg for that version so what's in Debian Testing is still only v1.6.9. And since the hard freeze in preparation for the Debian release of Buster as the new stable has gone active, there is no more auto migration to Testing for updated packages in Debian unstable until after the new version has been released. Besides still waiting for the last 3 debconf translations so that the pkg can be updated with them, I've also been thinking about a major change in the package; that being changing it so that it uses the dojo distributed in the LedgerSMB archive instead of that in Debian like is already being done with our 'ledgersmb-1.6' package, on the basis that the version in Debian is not the same as that actually being used by the app itself. There's not that much of a dojo related version difference with what LedgerSMB 1.6 uses (Debian testing has v1.14.2) but that's not the case for LSMB 1.7 so it's something I need to look at in any case. A ledgersmb package with major changes could always be uploaded to Debian Experimental (& our package repos, of course), so that's what I'll be looking at doing if necessary. Related to that is still getting the autopkgtest functionality done for the package. That (which does 'as installed' testing) is useful I think in any case but in particular having to do related to the different dojo versions. But that is based on my thinking that the JS code is actually being at least somewhat exercised in the 't/' and or 'xt/' testing, which I was wondering about due to something one the other devs said/ but which I've been assured that the JS code is being exercised in the bdd tests in xt/. So I figure to work on getting the t/ tests working for the autopkgtest to start off with and continue from there to the xt/ tests. Any comments/questions/etc, please let know. -- Robert J. Clay jame(a)rocasa.us rjclay(a)gmail.com

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ledgersmb is marked for autoremoval from testing
by Debian testing autoremoval watch 23 Mar '19

23 Mar '19

ledgersmb 1.6.9+ds-1 is marked for autoremoval from testing on 2019-04-13 It (build-)depends on packages with these RC bugs: 923905: libdbd-pg-perl: FTBFS (failing tests)

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Release of ledgersmb-1.6 package v1.6.10-1
by Robert J. Clay 20 Jan '19

20 Jan '19

An initial version of the debian ledgersmb-1.6 package version for LedgerSMB v1.6.10 has been created and uploaded to our PPA[1], for Ubuntu 'disco' (v19.04) and 'cosmic' (v18.10) as well as for 'bionic' (v18.04 LTS). (The debian source packages are available as well.) The packages at our PPA: ledgersmb-1.6 ledgersmb-1.6-apache ledgersmb-1.6-lighttpd ledgersmb-1.6-nginx ledgersmb-1.6-varnish Only the main 'ledgersmb-1.6' package is required; the others are related to which web proxy you might want to use and you only need one of them. (They depend on their respective web proxy applications and attempt to do at least some setup for them.) Note that I haven't created a ledgersmb-1.6 package yet at our apt package repository[2] for Debian 'Buster' (which is expected to be Debian v10) as that Debian version has not yet been released. It is, however, expected later this year so if people would like that I start making it available as well, please let me know. -- 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://launchpad.net/~ledgersmb/+archive/ubuntu/main/+packages [2] https://apt.ledgersmb.org/

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