openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Raphael Valyi <rvalyi@xxxxxxxxx>]

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