Re: Default dates on transaction entry screens - ex 1.2.0-rc5 problem with cash receipt

[David Tangye <..hidden..>]

On Thu, 2007-04-12 at 18:59 -0700, Chris Travers wrote:
> Certainly in the bulk of that
> market, the tolerance for the need for technical knowledge to do
> configuration as we see in Oracle is not going to be there.
Agreed.

> Yeah, but....  none of the settings do them *any* good if they get
> lost trying to change things.
Agreed.

> 99% of this should be in the building of custom solutions (programmer-level) anyway.
I don't agree. I understand that this would sound good to you as a
programmer though. :-).

> > Its just an option to help others who may not work exactly the same way as you do.
> >
> How much time do they want to spend looking for that right setting?
I am talking of either one or maybe 6-8 options to do with default
dates, on a preferences page. I do not see that as a big time waster.

> The standard joke about Oracle is that it has so many I/O settings
> that you can hire a DBA full time to do nothing but tune your
> database's I/O.  And it has so many setting per table that you can
> hire another DBA full time to do nothing but tune the tables.  Our
> target market will not tolerate that.
Oracle 6 and 7 did suffer from option overload. One consultant from
Oracle England used to travel the world to the biggest corporates that
had performance issues and most of the time he said his first task was
to return all db options to default, then tune about 4 to 6 of them,
then tell the DBA's to keep their sticky hands off and go do something
useful :-). From later 7.3.x and through 8.x the options got
consolidated a lot, as their implications became understood. Table
tuning and moving away from 3NF is another matter, usually a silly
application-design issue. That's another story, which I remember we
discussed and agreed on a long time ago.

I think you are a long long way from this sort of thing happening.

> The fact is.... if we design the application right, stuff that needs
> to be customized can be so done easily by programmers of moderate
> skill, while the settings that users really *need* can be available.
Agreed. I think the date thing is something users like me really want.
Throw the idea out as you see fit.