Re: Future of LedgerSMB: Ideas and RFC

[Nigel Titley <..hidden..>]

On Wed, 2011-05-18 at 19:54 -0700, John Locke wrote:

> I feel like I'm alone in using LSMB 1.3 in production -- I keep hitting
> really basic bugs that prevent me from being able to get my books done,
> and I'm sure would affect anybody else using the system. Again, we're
> limping along, patching as we need to and have a moment, getting lots of
> help from Chris -- but it's far from ready for production. To get there,
> it needs more daring shops who can live with some pain to actually put
> it into production, like me, so we can all start squashing these bugs --
> and we need a way to get the fixes quickly shared with everyone else,
> without Chris being a bottleneck.

I agree... I just haven't jumped into 1.3 in production use because I'm
certain that my business will come crashing down around my ears if I do.
I used to use Gnucash to run my business and the beta code was stable
enough that I felt confident in using it for production. Sure, there
were bugs, but nothing that undermined the fundamental coherence of the
accounts (because the gnucash accounting engine is rock solid and very
rarely tampered with). I left gnucash for LSMB because I was attracted
by the inventory and multicurrency business features of LSMB and in the
main they work very well. But the user interface is a crock. Sending out
invoices is a total nightmare. I have one staff member who works full
time on it. Importing bank data is another, again I have a part-timer
whose sole job is to load bank data manually.

I'd love to use 1.3 in production, but I really don't think I can at the
moment. I commit to doing some testing, but experience tells me that
testing only finds 50% of the bugs. The rest come out in actual
production use.

Nigel