[ledgersmb-devel] Proposal to branch 1.6

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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