Re: Seek more attention; Re: Better tools for community cohesion?

Installing and running an ERP will always be a complex task. In my view there is a role for packagers to facilitate the process of installation in specific environments. When installing in another environment, one will see him or herself confronted with the same problems that packagers do.

Chris and I recognised that a lot of potential users had difficulty in setting up LedgerSMB. That's one of the big reasons why we created our LedgerSMB hosting business Efficito. With our current EU and US based servers, we can (and do) reach out to both North American and EU based businesses, with customers as far as in the Far East.

Sorry - - - this is not what I would consider proper for my accounting program. If I cannot install it then I cannot understand what it is doing and I therefore will not trust the security of the program and my information in it. This makes the program unusable for my needs. Are you sure this the the model you are wanting?

Could you explain a bit more what you do not consider proper for your accounting program? I'm afraid I don't understand well enough to respond: The model is what it has always been - volunteers working on an ERP system to provide the best experience with respect to stability, usability and security as possible - which includes installation and company creation. That's what the model has been and as far as I know that's what the model will be. The fact that Efficito now provides hosted LedgerSMB solutions in the same way Istvan and Brian do, doesn't change any of that.

In order to be aware of weak spots we're very much dependent on users reporting the issues they run into with clear and exact problem descriptions. When asked, Chris seemed to remember you had a lot of issues getting LedgerSMB installed yourself. However, neither of us can remember if you submitted an issue report which clearly describes which problems you've run into (and what you did to resolve/work around them). If we missed that, we're sorry. Could you send it again? If we didn't, it'd greatly help us if you did send one, since that might help us get some of the process fixed.

The fact that LedgerSMB runs on OpenBSD, Linux-in-all-its-variants and Windows pretty much eliminates the possibility to build a generally usable, one-size-fits-all installer with dependencies. Combined with the fact that on many Linux/Unix systems LedgerSMB will share its Apache and PostgreSQL usage with other applications, we think it's not safe to change pg_hba.conf, postgresql.conf and/or apache configuration files. This leaves open a great opportunity for contributions either to the project directly or to the community in general through separate projects. I'm all in favor for either. Debian has such a project: the Debian LedgerSMB package, which is delevoped in the Debian project. As I said, I greatly welcome similar efforts.

In addition of the above, I'd like to point out that the term ERP in my original post was chosen with care. If your choice of terms regarding "accounting system" is chosen with equal care, I think we might not have the same goals as I consider accounting as just one of the aspects an ERP has to provide. The others minimally being order management, invoicing, quoting, inventory management, credit risk management (including AR, AP and arrears) and several others. As you probably understand, these additional functionalities require additional dependencies. With additional dependencies come additional setup complexities. If all you want is accounting, maybe we need additional instructions on how to install a slimmed down version which installs without all the hassle?

I hope that explains my position and maybe clears up some misunderstandings. However, as I said, I might have completely misunderstood your point about being unable to understand the software you can't install yourself.

Bye,

Erik.

http://efficito.comÂ-- Hosted accounting and ERP.

Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.