Re: future of LedgerSMB

[Jeff Gerritsen <..hidden..>]

I believe a healthy discussion on the future of LSMB is needed, although I'm 
concerned about two issues, one being discussed and one not being discussed!

The concerns I have are about the one issue being discussed may degenerate 
into unproductive language and platform wars - although (I believe) a remote 
possibility).  The second issue not being discussed (at least I haven't seen 
much written about it) is what are our intended users needs?  Shouldn't these 
needs be the driving force behind the future direction of LSMB?  Therefore, 
based upon user needs, can we not make intelligent decisions on the future of 
LSMB?

While each language has it's strengths and weaknesses, both Perl and Python 
are mature, fully functional, and have a whole host of toolkits available to 
them.  Personally Python has a very slight advantage to me due to the syntax 
style, but that is mostly immaterial compared to user needs.

Have we taken a "holistic" look at LSMB and user needs?  For example, would 
ecommerce integration be a desired need?  Or integration with a popular CMS?  
Or is enhanced light manufacturing a need being expressed?  I suggest we 
first prioritize user needs and let them be the "basic" drivers in a 
discussion on the future of LSMB.

Jeff Gerritsen

On Monday 22 January 2007 08:16, Chris Travers wrote:
> Every language has the possibility of running into cross-platform
> issues on some level.  I have found, for example. that Perl has a few
> Windows issues, but these can be easily worked around.  I would expect
> that other scripting languages may run into issues with braind-dead
> Win32 API behavior too (for example the exec() system call behaves...
> unexpectedly,,, on that platform).
>
> The big cross-platform disadvantage for Perl up until recently has
> been the lack of an alternative to ActivePerl (which is not freely
> redistributable).  Vanilla Perl (our current approach) is better in
> many regards.