Hi all; Looking at this, I would like to suggest that after 1.3, we just begin work LedgerSMB 2.0. I would like to make a set of concrete proposals regarding this development.
The basic approach I would like to push is that of "kernalization," or of essentially creating a smaller project with more optional addons. There is no reason for a financial services business to have inventory control, and multiple types of POS modules should be eventually available for different industries (food service and retail sales have different requirements for example). This would also push the system much further towards being a platform for applications distributed with a sample application. Under this approach, the core codebase would be much smaller with LedgerSMB 2.0 when it is first released and the core feature set will be much smaller. In particular, I am thinking that the minimal featureset used by general businesses should be included here: GL, Financial statements, and account management, AR/AP transactions, and basic customer/vendor management. This will also mean we will have fewer CPAN modules required and a much simpler database than in 1.3. Hopefully this would allow simpler businesses to move to LSMB 2.0 sooner, while other businesses may have to wait a bit longer while addons are being developed. Platform Requirements: If we are going straight for LedgerSMB 2.0, I would recommend requiring DBD::Pg 2.15 or later, PostgreSQL 8.4 or later, etc. We all know that the tradeoff in this set of requirements is that the active development community for 2.0 will probably be smaller for a while, but that it will require fewer rewrites later. This is mitigated to a large extent by the fact that most of the lacking functionality in 1.3 can be developed first on 1.3 as a set of addons and later ported to 2.0. Porting most addons should not be extremely difficult provided that certain development practices are followed (to be discussed in separate proposal). Support for LedgerSMB 1.3 would not be phased out any time in the near future and would be supported for a minimum of five years from the present (more likely to be supported beyond that as long as sufficient demand allows). I would also suggest that we make a core requirement that the software runs on mod_perl out of the box in all Apache MPM's, as well as on Windows under StrawberryPerl (CGI only on Windows is fine). This would result in the core of LSMB 2.0 being far smaller and with fewer features than 1.x with the idea that the missing features would be added via modules that would be developed possibly after the initial release of LSMB 2.0. I have some proposals for framework changes but will make them in a separate post. What do folks think? This would complete the process begun in 1.3, and help us achieve a more stable codebase faster. Best Wishes, Chris Travers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Ledger-smb-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ledger-smb-devel
