Re: Future of LedgerSMB: Ideas and RFC

[Philip Rhoades <..hidden..>]

Chris,


On 2011-05-18 06:53, Chris Travers wrote:
> Hi all;
>
> Many of you may be frustrated at the pace of development of LedgerSMB
> and the fact that 1.3 has not yet been released.  Development may
> appear to have slowed. Public discussions become less frequent...
>
> For the last few years, LedgerSMB has achieved significant growth.
> Some of that growth has come at an organizational cost and for that I
> apologize to the community.  Now I have to try to help put the
> organizational stuff back together.
>
> In reality, far from being quiet, LedgerSMB 1.3 has had a huge amount
> of commissioned work done on it, not only for the core system (where
> the customer/vendor management, reconciliation, and payment interfaces
> have been completely rewritten) but also in areas of addons for fixed
> asset handling, template transactions, so forth.  We have eliminated a
> lot of performance bottlenecks for larger databases, and provided a
> much higher level of security than previous versions.  This has been a
>   very ambitious project and we are much better off for it.
>
> I would like to propose a few specific directional approaches and get
> feedback from the community before proceeding.
>
> I think the major priorities at this point need to be:
> 1)  Getting 1.3 out the door.
> 2)  Focusing heavily on community building
> 3)  Trying to build partnerships with other open source business
> projects (perhaps GNU Med and others?)
>
>
> To this end I would like to tentatively suggest the following:
> The first is a regular beta release schedule for 1.3...  Maybe every
> other Tuesday?
>
> There are some committed fixes for 1.2 which have not made it into a
> release.  I would like to release this as soon as possible.  However,
> given the fact that bug reports have slowed, I think it is likely that
> it is not likely that 1.2 will see another release absent developing
> problems  like issues caused by new versions of Perl.
>
> I'd also like to encourage anyone who is interested in contributing to
> start looking heavily at 1.3.  This is a place where you can earn a
> name in the CONTRIBUTORS file, or possibly even commit privileges.
>
> But in addition I would like to see what the community thinks.  What
> do you think we need to do to pull things back together and bring the
> project to the next level?


I have been meaning to post re whether 1.3 was still going or not . . so 
your post is good timing.

I might summarise my position - I:

- am an ex-user of SQL-L

- have used 1.2 happily in the past on a now defunct company

- have a few uses for LSMB but have avoided installing 1.2 again
hoping that 1.3 would be available "soon"

- have attempted to install and debug 1.3 a couple of times

- would be in the category of a technical (but not a developer) user who 
is happy to test new stuff and provide feedback

- would love to see LSMB vigorous and developing

- have looked at PostBooks but it seems overkill for what I want whereas 
a solid and reliable LSMB 1.3 would be perfect for me

Regards,

Phil.
--
Philip Rhoades

GPO Box 3411
Sydney NSW	2001
Australia
E-mail:  ..hidden..