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.