doc/release_notes



RELEASE NOTES
LedgerSMB 1.2


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 the feature set is starting to diverge rapidly.

1.1 System Requirements:

* Perl 5.8.
* Apache, IIS, or other web server that supports CGI.
* PostgreSQL 8.0 or higher.  7.3 and 7.4 could be supported with some effort but
will not work out of the box.
* Any operating system that supports the above environment.
* The following CPAN modules:
    * Data::Dumper
    * Locale::Maketext
    * Locale::Maketext::Lexicon
    * MIME::Base64
    * Digest::MD5
    * HTML::Entities
    * DBI
    * DBD::Pg
    * Math::BigFloat
    * IO::File
    * Encode
    * Locale::Country
    * Locale::Language
    * Time::Local
    * Cwd
    * Config::Std
    * MIME::Lite

    
2:  What's New in 1.2?

2.1: Database changes:

All core tables now have defined primary keys.  This allows Slony-I to be 
supported out of the box.

Chris Browne has contributed a setup script for Slony.  It is in the 
utils/replication directory.

Also all user information has been moved into the database and the password 
algorythm has been changed from crypt to md5.  This means that users will need 
to convert their accounts prior to first login on the new system (if this is an
upgrade).

Also now the defaults table has moved from a one column per value structure to a simple key->value structure.


2.2:  Security

LedgerSMB 1.2 has been through a detailed SQL injection audit of the codebase
inherited from SQL-Ledger.  As a result several vulnerabilities which were known
to be exploitable were corrected along with hundreds of places where
vulnerabilities may have been exploitable but we didn't have time to verify the
what was involved in exploiting it.  We believe though that many or most of the
issues were exploitable given a little time and effort.

Also, we discovered the template editor's security system was moved from
blacklisting to whitelisting, eliminating a whole class of possible security
issues.

2.3:  New Features

Metatron Technology Consulting's SL-POS codebase was merged with this project,
providing a framework for POS hardware support and more.

Online credit card processing support has been added.

LSMB now supports an arbitrary number of defined currencies for a business and 
is no longer limited to 3.

2.4:  Localization Changes

Localization functions now use Gettext .po files on all platforms.  This means that standard translation management tools will work with LSMB translations.

2.5:  Other changes

The ledger-smb.conf is now an inifile which will reduce the level of expertise 
necessary to configure it for non-Perl users.

3:  Known Issues
Reposting invoices is known to cause inaccuracies cost of goods sold and
inventory accounts.  This problem has been confirmed to affect SQL-Ledger 2.6.x 
as well and is caused by problems involving the de-allocation and trasaction
reversal routines.  It will be corrected (by removing the ability to truly
repost invoices) in an upcoming version as we continue to re-engineer the
application.

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

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

4.2: Session handling
SQL-Ledger as of 2.6.17 used 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.  While this was 
corrected in 2.6.18, the solutions chosen by SQL-Ledger (caching the crypted 
password by the browser) is not in line with commonly accepted best security
practices.

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.  In the initial release both
SQL-Ledger-style session ID's and the newer version were required to access the
application.  In newer versions, the SQL-Ledger style session ID's have been 
removed.

4.3: 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.

5:  Roadmap
This project has no defined roadmap but rather a set of statements and 
objectives contained in the documentation manager and trackers of sourceforge.
In general, our development is focused around the following principles:

* LSMB as infrastructure:  LSMB should be accessible from other applications.

* Universal applicability:  LSMB should be usable by any any business and should
always do the right thing in the background.  Businesses should never find that 
they have outgrown the software.

* Focus on Small to Midsize Businesses:  LSMB's core market will remain in the
small to midsize market.

6:  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.