c2c-oerpscenario team mailing list archive

[Philip Hands <phil@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Antony,

Well done for looking at the bug, but ...

On Mon, 08 Nov 2010 18:52:17 -0000, Antony Lesuisse <al@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Localisation contributions have been reviewed and are ready to be merged
> in trunk from niv branch:
> 
> https://code.launchpad.net/~openerp-dev/openobject-addons/niv-dev-addons
> 
> I close this bug, open a new one if you still find issues with the new
> l10n_uk module.
> 
> ** Changed in: openobject-addons
>        Status: New => Fix Released

13 months?  For a bug this obviously damaging to new users?

That's really depressing, and is one of the several reasons that I
abandoned OpenERP.

Admittedly, OpenERP was not a very good fit for my 1-person consultancy
in a country that clearly wasn't supported, but I did burn what amounts
to weeks of my time trying to get it to be able to add up sufficiently
to do my taxes with it, and did inflict the pain of trying to work out
what the bloody hell it was doing with my figures for several days every
quarter for almost 2 years. (other bugs reported by me include the other
uk-minimal-chart adding input tax to output tax -- and that was the
recommended one at the time despite also being broken)

Your timing is somewhat amusing -- I just spent the weekend entering all
my figures for the past 2 years into an instance of ledger
(a.k.a. ledger-cli or c++ ledger) which is much more suited to me, so
I'll not be returning to OpenERP I'm afraid -- I even dabbled with
Tryton for a while, which seems to have fixed many of the community
issues, and if I'd started with that, I'd probably still be using it,
but by then I was fed up with the whole approach.

Interestingly, the results from ledger are similar, but different, from
those generated by OpenERP.  If I still cared even slightly, I'd track
this down and report a bug, but the risk that the bug seems likely to be
totally ignored for a year means that I'm not inclined to spend any more
time on it.

Why am I even bothering to mention this to you?

Well, as demonstrated by the fact that I stuck with it for a couple of
years, rather than abandoning ship immediately, I thought it would be
really good to have, and use an accounting system that I could sell to
my clients.  I'm not going to contemplate that with a system that I have
apparently failed to understand.  I'm certainty not going to offer
support on a program when the lead developers are so unreactive to
outside information -- How could I have made it clearer that the module
this bug was reported was toxic?  It very nearly killed my enthusiasm
for OpenERP on it's own.  Removing it would have done no harm
whatsoever, and yet it didn't even get triaged (as far I was aware by
looking at launchpad).

So, the reason I'm typing this is that I would judge that you have
systemic problems with the way you deal with input from outside your
core developers, which will tend to drive people who might otherwise
have turned into valuable contributors, and so harm the project in the
long term.  This is a shame, and I'd hope you can have a think about
that and see if you can do something to address it.

It probably doesn't need to be a big thing -- if after a month (or two,
or six) I'd seen that someone had managed to classify the bug, or in some
other way obviously prod it, I'd have been somewhat more cheerful about
it -- I might then have been moved to campaign further for the module to
be removed, depending on the feedback received, rather than using the
lack of activity to confirm my theory that you have a NIH problem, and
so looking for the exit.

Anyway, good luck.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
|-|  HANDS.COM Ltd.                    http://www.uk.debian.org/
|(|  10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London  E18 1NE  ENGLAND

-- 
l10n_chart_uk is thoroughly broken, and should be removed (or fixed)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/462806
You received this bug notification because you are a member of C2C
OERPScenario, which is subscribed to the OpenERP Project Group.

Status in OpenObject Addons Modules: Fix Released

Bug description:
Looking at:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~openerp-commiter/openobject-addons/trunk-extra-addons/annotate/3988/l10n_chart_uk/account_chart.xml

which I presume is the latest version of this.

As an example of the sort of breakage I'm on about, looking at the XML we see that Goodwill Amortisation is id="chart0012", and all the accounts to do with banking, from "Bank Current Account" to "Company Credit Card" (i.e. all the chart12?? accounts) have <field name="parent_id" ref="chart0012"/>, which is nonsense.

The Profit & Loss Account is set as <field name="type">other</field>, whereas it should presumably be type view, and one might think that Sales would have been one of it's children, but Sales has <field name="parent_id" ref="chart0040"/>, where chart0040 is "Furniture and Fixtures".

In case you're wondering, it seems that (as mentioned here:  http://openobject.com/forum/topic8610.html) l10n_chart_uk was copied from SQL-Ledger, which was already broken.

I get the impression that I'm not alone in having been fooled by the name of this module into thinking that it might be useful in the UK, with the result that yet another attempt to get OpenERP up and running was sabotaged -- please remove it, fix it, or rename it to something like l10n_chart_uk_experimental_nonsense.