openerp-expert-framework team mailing list archive

[Raphael Valyi <rvalyi@xxxxxxxxx>]

So completing my yesterday's email,

I should have mentioned that Akretion already pull out of the extra-addons
the Magentoerpconnect and other common architecture e-commerce addons in
new branches, for instances:
https://code.launchpad.net/~extra-addons-commiter/e-commerce-addons/oerp6.1-cleanning
https://code.launchpad.net/~extra-addons-commiter/openobject-extension/oerp6.1-cleanning
https://code.launchpad.net/~extra-addons-commiter/product-extra-addons/oerp6.1-cleanning


Also, as I said, we would now like to pull out the commonly used financial
addons from the extra-addons.
We are trying to help ourselves for Brazil, but also thinking to Spanish
users who share a few axtra-addons with us (many other localizations do but
these are the 2 localizations I know that depends on these modules), so
here is a proposal of branch extraction:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AlrjP6ETn3tJdDRIS3NsTkJ4YmR6eUlZeXJKOHp0N3c&output=html

As for now, if there is no opposition to this I would extract the
first "account-payment-extra"
branch only. That would d the job for us in Brazil and hopefully help
Spanish users too at least.
That branch would hence extract together the following modules:

   - account_payment_extension
   - purchase_payment
   - sale_payment
   - pxgo_bank_statement_analytic
   - pxgo_cash_statement
   - pxgo_bank_statement_running_balance
   - paydays
   - nan_account_bank_statement


As described in this superficial analysis, Spanish users may also want to
extract the account-chart-extra branch, the account-sequence-extra branch
and may be others.

I asked their opinion about the prominent Spanish localization
contributors, but if you want to comment on the spreadsheet, please ask me
to give you write access.

Extraction script and extraction instructions will follow hopefully.

Any comment?

-- 
Raphaël Valyi
Founder and consultant
http://twitter.com/rvalyi <http://twitter.com/#!/rvalyi>
+55 21 2516 2954
www.akretion.com





On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Raphael Valyi <rvalyi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Dear OpenERP experts,
>
> Some of you might not have already think about it, but those who have all
> came to the same conclusion I will re-explain here:
>
> *The problem*
>
> The system of the single extra-addons branch should now be avoided because
> it doesn't scale in term of code and community management:
>
>    1. enabling or restricting commit rights doesn't scale: you may want
>    to allow commit rights to anybody of your team for you little non critical
>    extra-addons but the other users may want to be sure the extra financial
>    addons they are using in production are rock solid and not screwed
>    overnight by some beginner.
>    2. extra-addons receive commits for a huge number of addons. Hence
>    it's really challenging to track the code evolution of the critical
>    extra-addons you use
>    3. because there are so many extra-addons, the branch is huge! Often
>    you just need 2 or 3 extra addons and you are still forced to download
>    hundreds of Mb of code. This is specially discouraging contributions in all
>    the countries where Internet isn't so fast...
>    4. because there has been no quality management of those modules, the
>    extra-addons branch is full of poor quality non reusable, non migrated
>    modules. Probably 75% of the extra-addons modules are broken and not
>    reusable outside from the initial company or even POC they where developed
>    for. Worse than that, at the beginning, say back in 2008, Tiny and Axelor
>    were putting almost all their POC modules with not enough quality to
>    qualify as addons in the extra-addons branch, resulting in garbage modules
>    lagging the extra-addons quality until today. Following this "example", few
>    companies refrained themselves from pushing their low quality modules in
>    the extra-addons during those years.
>    5. often you need to improve some extra-addons for several reasons,
>    mostly:
>       1. adapt it further to the current stable OpenERP version your are
>       using,
>       2. add new features for the company you are working for if you
>       think it makes sense to have that feature inside the module
>       3. fix a bug in a non backward compatible way
>       4. refactor the code to make the module more compatible with some
>       other modules or localization
>
> In all those cases, the proper way is to create a new "feature branch" and
> eventually merge it back into the "stable" branch. But because things
> aren't so mature yet, often changes are not backward compatibles and it's
> better to stay in a new branch people should explicitly pick, while keeping
> the "stable" branch for really stable things people can update without
> special care (ideally). If a branch has many modules like the extra-addons,
> then it creates many parallel versions of the same modules which is a real
> hassle to maintain (addons_path won't do the job etc...)
>
>
> *The solution*
>
> Some of us know that for some time already, so instead of bloating the
> extra-addons with new modules, we have been creating new modules in new
> branches since one or two years.
>
> But now, we should go further, we should move the extra-addons we use
> often out from the extra-addons into smaller manageable branches.
>
> Because ERP means big money involved, OpenERP contributor copyrights are
> often abused while copyrights tend to be an essential pillar of how open
> source works. So it's essential that the bzr history of the extracted
> module don't get lost and that real authors can be traced back (if that get
> lost, it will increase the risk somebody comes and change the license
> claiming they are the only author).
> At Akretion we developed some semi-manual script to do that and replay the
> module commits in the new branch. I'll pass it soon in this list.
>
> Also what's the solution: one module per branch or several modules in a
> branch?
>
> Well eco-systems that use well working module managements system tend to
> use the one module per branch approach as one can easily rebuild at anytime
> all the dependency tree with the proper module version that have been
> tested to work together.
>
> But given the OpenERP approach of not dealing with module version
> dependencies
> http://openerp-server.readthedocs.org/en/latest/module-versioning.html,
> it will not be easy to spot the compatible modules versions (that
> information is not even stored!). Imagine if you used 20 extra-addons, you
> would now need to do bzr pull in 20 different branches and ensure manually
> you are taking the proper branches and updating to compatible revisions...
> So given this situation, at Akretion we think it can still make sense to
> group some related modules inside the same branch until possible better
> module management appears and possible further branch split.
>
>
> *Grouping modules together*
>
> Then comes the grouping problem: what modules go together into the same
> branch? Well, unfortunately there won't be some clear rule, it has to be a
> tradeoff. One could think just put everything that depends on sale
> together, everything that depend on stock together. Unfortunately this
> isn't that simple: there are modules having multiple core dependencies and
> many border line cases (where would the stock_rma module fit: stock or
> CRM?, where would the account_fiscal_position_rule module fit: account or
> sale?)
>
> So let's start discussing those groupings if you like. I'm taking several
> factors into account:
>
>    - dependencies
>    - functional domain
>    - authors
>    - avoid to leave just one required module alone in a new branch to
>    checkout if possible
>    - usage in localizations...
>
>
> *Example*
>
> Sebastien Beau (Akretion) already extracted the fiscal rule modules
> together in a new project/branch:
> https://code.launchpad.net/openerp-fiscal-rules
> It contains those modules who where extra-addons originally:
>
>    - account_fiscal_position_rule
>    - account_fiscal_position_rule_purchase
>    - account_fiscal_position_rule_sale
>    - account_fiscal_position_rule_stock
>    - account_product_fiscal_classification
>
>
> We developed those above modules for the Brazilian localization. But in
> fact they are potentially useful for managing the fiscal positions in all
> countries which are federations (possibly even the USA) and are useful for
> international fiscal operations. Recently we started using them more for
> ecommerce projects in Europe and Canada for instance to select the right
> tax accounts even if the ecommerce front-end (like Magento) already pass
> the proper VAT ratio to OpenERP.
>
> We should continue that migration process further and ideally stop
> depending on the extra-addons for OpenERP v7 projects.
>
> Also, by removing the dependencies on that fat extra-addons repository, we
> also make automated Continuous Integration testing easier. At Akretion we
> are experimenting with Github mirrors and Travis-CI triggers to run
> automated test at every commit. It's not that we don't like the Runbot, but
> we can run the same tests for free on any branch and easily add support for
> next testing suites like OERPScenario test suites freely. Also, OpenERP SA
> re-affirmed they won't care about module dependencies, but this doesn't
> match what we do at Akretion (who here already tried to install the proper
> Magentoerpconnect dependencies?), so we will need to be able to specify the
> proper branch dependencies for all the testing and have no faith the Runbot
> can do that when the version dependencies will be missing from the module
> format. Well, instead free open source tools like Travis-CI provision a new
> Virtualbox machine at every run and do a fresh repository checkout, so by
> depending on lighter repositories, we also make all that easier to happen.
> This is part of the road to a better quality of those OpenERP modules.
>
>
> I would appreciate your view on that question and will post again soon to
> submit a new concrete module extraction proposal for the financial
> extra-addons used both by the Spanish and Brazilian localization at least.
>
>
> Best regards,
>
>
> --
> Raphaël Valyi
> Founder and consultant
> http://twitter.com/rvalyi <http://twitter.com/#!/rvalyi>
> +55 21 2516 2954
> www.akretion.com
>
>
>