Hi,

Over at the LedgerSMB chat channel, we've been considering branching 1.6 to start its stabilization period. With the merge of the most blocking prerequisites this weekend (infrastructure to develop pre-upgrade tests which run before schema&version upgrades) and with the impressive Changelog as listed below "now" feels like a natural branchpoint.

We've taken a look at the issues which are marked to block 1.6 (https://github.com/ledgersmb/LedgerSMB/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Ablocking+milestone%3A1.6). Of the three issues listed there, one (#2432) can easily be backported to the release branch as it simply inverts the meaning of a checkbox. The same applies to #3363, which is a development-half-finished on my part; it can probably be closed pretty quickly as all that needs to be done is add an extra field on all INSERTs into the GL table.

The last issue (#1077) looks like it's pretty large and won't be able to make it into 1.6, unless there's someone to step up and invest a significant amount of time  in it in the coming weeks. Here, we think delaying to the next release (and working on a representative test-set to show the problem) is likely the only option we have as a project.

All-in-all, we seem to be at a natural point for branching 1.6.

Comments? Remarks? 

Changelog for 1.6 Series
Forthcoming

User Interface
* Reports and search results exportable to XLS(X) (Yves L)
* Left menu replaced by a (faster) Dojo-based version (Yves L/Erik H)

Installation & Administration
* Added 'System Information' page to setup.pl for problem diagnosis (Erik H)
* Numerous improvements for the migrations and infrastructure (Yves L/Erik H)
* Better detection of incorrect @INC paths (David G)
* Automatic date format selection using browser locale (Yves L/Erik H)
* No more warnings from database creation and upgrade (Erik H)
* Improved logging: various logs correlated using unique request IDs (Erik H)
* Functions 'warn()' and 'die()' logged to debug logs (Erik H)
* Removed need for 'tempdir' and associated configuration option (Nick P)
* Removed numerous unused configuration options (Nick P)
* Specific output formats can be disabled in configuration (Yves L)
* Respect smtpuser and smtppass configuration options (Nick P)
* Add smtpport configuration option (Nick P)

Performance
* PSGI responses no longer written to file but kept in memory (Erik H/Yves L)

Rewritten inventory tracking and adjustments
* Removed the need for the ill-understood 'Inventory Entity' (Erik H)
* Inventory adjustments GL transactions instead of dummy invoices (Erik H)
* SQL & in-browser(BDD) tests (Erik H)

Code cleanup
* Removed code duplication in
  - Template handling framework (Yves L)
* Remove unused variables and unreachable code (Nick P)
* Remove fragments of REST framework never fully implemented (Erik H)
* Authentication handling centralized in request dispatch code (Erik H)
* Cleaned up handling of uploaded files in request handling (Erik H)
* Moved to Plack::Request (from CGI::Simple & LedgerSMB) (Erik H)
* Template format plugin cleanup and refactoring (Erik H/Nick P)
* Template handling code cleanup (Erik H/Nick P)
* Unreferenced UI templates deleted (Erik H)
* Centralized and more robust entry point for code in old/ (Erik H)
* Merge of SQL-Ledger 2.8 and 3.0 migration code; improved consistency (Yves L)
* Improved cleanup of temp files and dirs after use (Erik H)
* Improved HTML structure (balanced closing/opening tags, etc) (Yves L)
* Factored HTTP response responsibility out of LedgerSMB::Template (Erik H)
* Moved request pre- and post-processing into custom Plack Middlewares (Erik H)

Quality assurance
* Port testing of database routines to pgTAP (and Perl's 'prove') (Yves L)
* Enforce numerous Perl::Critic policies with code cleanup (Nick P/Rob R)
* Add tests for all template output formats (Nick P)

Erik H is Erik Huelsmann
Yves L is Yves Lavoie
Nick P is Nick Prater
Rob R is Rob Ransbottom
David G is David Godfrey

--

Bye,

Erik.

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