Re: Future of LedgerSMB: Ideas and RFC

[Nigel Titley <..hidden..>]

On Tue, 2011-05-17 at 13:53 -0700, 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...

Like many others have commented, yes, the delay in getting 1.3 out of
the door has been frustrating. However, I appreciate that OS products
often suffer this road bump effect when a major release is coming up.

> 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.

As someone who has paid for some of this commissioned work (about 3
years ago) and not yet seen it appear in a release, I'm reserving
judgement. I've no doubt that a lot of work has been done but I'd really
like to see an update to the roadmap with a little more detail,
especially in the near future. Things may well be moving but one thing
I've learned over the years is that communication is king.
 
> 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.

Fully agree... in particular I am looking forward to the improvements in
reconciliation, customer management and, dare I say it, bulk invoicing.

> 2)  Focusing heavily on community building

This is vital. LedgerSMB seems to be teetering on the brink of becoming
moribund. Whether this is true or just seems to be true is neither here
nor there, if it *seems* to be true it will become so.

> 3)  Trying to build partnerships with other open source business
> projects (perhaps GNU Med and others?)

Yes... I have an operational bridge working between Oscommerce and
LedgerSMB that I'm happy to throw into the pot, especially once the
Ledgersmb RESTful interface comes out of the woodwork.

> 
> 
> 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?

Sounds good.

> 
> 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.

1.2 works perfectly adequately for our business at the moment. We
haven't seen any show stopper bugs for a very long time.

> 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.

I'll get it downloaded and start trialling it...

> 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?

See above... we need to dispel the impression of moribundity that is
hanging around LedgerSMB at the moment. Fresh code attracts fresh ideas
and fresh developers.

Nigel

PS And thanks to all who have developed and continue to develop LSMB