Re: ledger-smb and SQL-Ledger-2.7 beta

["Chris Travers" <..hidden..>]

On 12/5/06, Jeff Kowalczyk <..hidden..> wrote:
> Not to troll, but:
>
> Is LedgerSMB planning to incorporate the new features SQL-Ledger-2.7 beta,
> scheduled for release mid December 2006?

Seems like SQL-Ledger 2.8 has been postponed (2.7 is the beta for
2.8).  There is no longer any date listed on the SQL-Ledger.com site
and the number of features promised is now double the number of
features listed in the beta.  So I don't know.  Going just by the
current iinfo on SQL-Ledger.com, I would expect 2.8 to be released
sometime Mid-December 2007 unless the feature list is drastically
shortened...

However, I think the current thought is that we want to maintain a
migration path from SQL-Ledger for at least the next 12-18 months.  So
the short answer is "yes."

However, we will probably do the features differently.  Our codebases
are diverging rapidly.
> This is more or less the motivation for my previous question about
> diff-minimzation. But that's just the technical work of incorporating the
> changes.

Don't bother trying to maintain diffs across the two forks.  We are
interested in building a new accounting/ERP app, not simply being
SQL-Ledger+bigfixes and new features...

There are a lot of areas where the codebases are already somewhat far
apart and the distance is going to get greater.
> My underlying question is whether ledger-smb is to be a cold-turkey fork, or if
> applicable changesets will migrate between the two codebases as a matter of policy/copyright?

It isn't a matter of policy or copyright.  Initially I expected we
could keep changes going back and forth.  However, we have had to make
a number of deep changes to the codebase in 1.2 that were unexpected,
and the more we scratch, the more we discover that we are going to
have to do a lot of re-engineering of the software.  In the end we
expect to get something that is a lot more maintainable than what we
have now, however.

Hope this helps,
Chris Travers