doc/release_notes



RELEASE NOTES
LedgerSMB 2.6.17

1:  Welcome to LedgerSMB

LedgerSMB is an accounting and ERP program initially aimed at small to midsize
businesses.  Currently the financials and supply chain management modules are
fairly complete, while other modules such as project management exist in a
rudamentary form.  The initial features are identical to SQL-Ledger 2.6.17 from
which it was derived, but it is expected that the feature set will diverge over
time.

2:  Differences between LedgerSMB and SQL-Ledger(TM)

2.1: Login name restrictions
Logins in SQL-Ledger can contain any printable characters.  In LedgerSMB these
are restricted to alphanumeric characters and the symbols ., @, _, and -.

2.2: Session handling
SQL-Ledger as of 2.6.17 uses session tokens for authentication.  These tokens
are based on the current timestamp and therefore insecure.  Furthermore, these
tokens are not tracked on the server, so one can easily forge credentials for
either the main application or the administrative interface.

LedgerSMB stores the sessions in the database.  These are generated as md5 sums
of random numbers and are believed to be reasonably secure.  The sessions time
out after a period of inactivity.  As of the initial release both
SQL-Ledger-style session ID's and the newer version are required to access the
application.  In future versions, the SQL-Ledger style session ID's will 
probably be removed.

2.3: Database Changes
Under certain circumstances where the Chart of Accounts is improperly modified,
it is possible to post transactions such that a portion of the transaction is
put into a NULL account.  LedgerSMB does not allow NULL values in the chart id
field of the transaction.

Also, the transaction amount has been changed from FLOAT to NUMERIC so that
arbitrary precision mathematics can be used in third party reports.  This ought
to also allow SQL-Ledger to properly scale up better as SUM operations on
floating points are unsafe for large numbers of records where accounting data is
involved.

3:  Roadmap
The project has no defined roadmap but rather a list of tasks and objectives
outlined in the TODO list.   There are many projects here and there are always
room for new ideas.

4:  Get Involved
Contributors should start by joining the LedgerSMB users and devel lists.  Code
contributions at the moment must be committed by either project maintainer and
should be submitted either using the patches interface at Sourceforge or the
devel mailing lists.

Additionally, we can use help in QA, documentation, advocacy, and many other
places. 

SQL-Ledger is a registered trademark of DWS systems and is not affiliated with 
this project or its members in any way.