Hello folks, just a few remarks:
at Akretion, in theory we totally support the Therp initiative and will try to join efforts here as much as possible (yes we know we don't do enough here yet sorry). At some points we did many sacrifices to support OpenERP SA vision. Overall we loose lot of efforts to ensure our customers invest on OPW and then fighting weeks and weeks to get things fixed but rarely merged in the official branch when it would have been easier to just make that fix ourselves (in his testimony here http://people.via.ecp.fr/~alexis/openerp/#maturite , just for Anevia, Alexis reports than less of 50% the OPW bug fixing get ever merged and the trend is just totally worth now that 6.1 is deprecated https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuWOM58OOk02dGQ2QjRDdWw5UjZ0T0hGR1R5T2tDVWc#gid=0 ). So at some point may be we will question the efficiency of this system and use our forces for more community things if it proves more effective for OpenERP as an ERP product. No strong decision made yet (we may in fact still sell 2 OPW quite soon), but unfortunately making a living from an open source activity is a hard thing and we should be absolutely successful where the resource is invested. Open source cannot afford wasting resources. To give a concrete example, yesterday I had to explain the biggest OpenERP user in Latin America in production (a Volkswagen supplier in Sao Paulo, 150 users an soon 200, using OpenERP since 2 years) why I wouldn't recommend migrating to v7 yet because of the contact thing (they do have contacts at Volkswagen and guess what they need them, but not as the invoiced partners). After 5 minutes of explanation the issue was crystal clear for them (the part that is not clear for OpenERP SA) and totally identified as a blocker and of course they couldn't believe it. We made huge efforts to ensure they bought an OPW and it put me in difficult situation preparing them psychologically to the fact that OpenERP isn't acknowledging being able to organize business documents by company as a regression in v7... I agree to say v7 comes with tremendous improvements. But many are just void when I see the regression around contacts management. I mean, all the v7 social goodness is really appealing, but isn't that specially appealing in a B2B context to follow document evolution and communicate around them? Currently because of that bug (read it very carefully, it's important folks!) https://bugs.launchpad.net/openobject-addons/+bug/1160365 we find ourselves in a situation where we are forbidding our customers to use contacts in OpenERP v7!! We know that as soon as they create company contacts, if they start using them in their business documents, should it be because of user mistakes, then accounting will be screwed (fiscal position and co not on contact of course) but mostly analysing documents and relating them by customer or supplier will be screwed too (it will be by contact and miss the other documents from the same company but a different contact). So unfortunately currently that voids many of the social flagship benefits of v7, no? IMHO, the worst in this bug isn't actually the bug in itself, it's the total lack of awareness about its real implication and lack of vision (or refusal) to fix it properly. I proposed a simple solution https://bugs.launchpad.net/openobject-addons/+bug/1160365/comments/27 which has been repeatedly rejected by OpenERP SA at the profit of some data duplication solution (copying data from partners to their contacts) which wouldn't fix half of the regressions (filtering and relating documents by company wouldn't be fixed, kind of suck for an ERP). You could also read this little innocent looking one https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1155679 which led me to discover the size of the iceberg. I see a few other hard regressions on v7, but I would say that as shocking as they might be, the others tend to be localized issues so they can more easily be worked around and let's say that except for 6.1 version that was a smooth transition (because in fact almost only the web-client was touched, there were no 'ERP innovation', in the past every new OpenERP version came with as many regressions and we had to work around them and we did it. So in any case, not everybody is going to migrate from 6.1 now, so we have to be organized to maintain it the best possible way and this the OCB branches is definitely a way to do that. As for v7, I believe there is that very divergent choice that has to be assumed: 1) do we keep partner_id keys in OpenERP objects as pointers to commercial entities as the code has been designed for these last 8 years, OR 2) do we accept to mix contact ids here, which then makes it impossible to use partner_id to filter and relate documents by companies (and leads to dozens of functional regressions just in the official addons if you accept to face the reality)? I think we should absolutely not go in that direction despite this is the direction OpenERP SA has been advocating for (read bug reports carefully). This is very important! Many community OpenERP modules will need to make that choice if they can rely on partner_id to point on a company record or not (and then develop code to get the related company record, not just to read its data, but also to find its unique id to compare with others). Potentially, that makes a n^2 incompatible combinations of community modules where n is the number of module for which partner_id matters... So if we keep refusing to make a decision about it, what we will get is a fatal dilution of community efforts between these two divergent visions and all these incompatibles combinations modules by modules. This leads nowhere unfortunately I think. At the moment we are forbidding our users to use company contacts, but this is a temporary stance, we cannot afford doing that forever in a B2B context or else we would have to admit 6.1 was better... Regards. -- Raphaël Valyi Founder and consultant http://twitter.com/rvalyi <http://twitter.com/#!/rvalyi> +55 21 2516 2954 www.akretion.com
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