1.3 Installation/Upgrade, WAS: Poll: Most helpful feature after 1.3?

[Chris Travers <..hidden..>]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 9:17 AM, ario <..hidden..> wrote:
> Wow! Unbelievable how I recognise myself in your description of how you
> tried to get the (super)users/owners set up.
> This is exactly what makes me reluctant to try to install 1.3
> immediately and right now.

1.3 is still a prerelease.  You shouldn't be installing it unless you
have help and/or know what you are doing.  I would also recommend it
as a prerelease only where the reconciliation or separation of duties
enhancements are required.

There are some specific pain areas that you can expect.  Customization
of templates will probably have to be redone because we have moved to
TemplateToolkit.  This is a one time change and we don't expect
further template changes after this time.

User management may also create a few headaches but these are ones we
can more easily address.

>
> As a side note, I also was a fervent Fedora user for many (maybe 15 now)
> years, but I gave up the 6 monthly OS upgrades and still run version 10
> at this time.
> Very recently however, I installed Fedora 15 on a newly acquired
> computer, only to find out that the Gnome desktop was locking the user
> (me) too much out of seeing and influencing what's actually going on, so
> I removed it and went with Ubuntu 11.04, despite the attractive features
> of SELinux (not to mention the NOT SO attractive features of the
> same :) ).

I am still on Fedora 13 in part because I am not so thrilled about Fedora 15.

>
> Anyway, I was (possibly quite naively) expecting that upgrading to 1.3
> would only involve setting up a brand new instance of Linux with
> LedgerSMB 1.3 and then importing the backup I most cleverly would have
> made of the 1.2 version that I'm running, but somehow reading the
> postings on this list I fear it won't be so easy, so I will just keep
> monitoring this list until I get a 'feeling' of how complicated it will
> get and how to do it, before I will make te switch.

A lot has been redesigned between 1.2 and 1.3.  As has been an ongoing
process we have also tightened up data constraints.   Duplicate or
missing customer or vendor numbers and duplicate ar invoice numbers
could cause problems.  Unlike past versions, we have decided to
provide a database upgrade wizard (not recommended for users of
replication solutions but then presumably they know what they are
doing).

In the spirit of trying to keep this as manageable as possible, the
upgrade wizard would check for known problems, at each problem found
give you a way to correct them, and then repeat the checks until know
more problems are found.  From there it will be a matter of importing
the data, then allowing you to correct data that has some issues (like
countries, missing addresses, etc).  Finally user permissions would
have to be reassigned.  I will have to go back and check but I thought
I sent a proposal to the list about an upgrade interface.

For a single user system, it should be enough to grant all permissions.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers