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  1. RELEASE NOTES
  2. LedgerSMB 1.1.0
  3. 1: Welcome to LedgerSMB
  4. LedgerSMB is an accounting and ERP program initially aimed at small to midsize
  5. businesses. Currently the financials and supply chain management modules are
  6. fairly complete, while other modules such as project management exist in a
  7. rudamentary form. The initial features are identical to SQL-Ledger 2.6.17 from
  8. which it was derived, but the feature set is starting to diverge rapidly.
  9. 1.1 System Requirements:
  10. * Perl 5.6 and higher (prefer 5.8).
  11. * Apache, IIS, or other web server that supports CGI.
  12. * PostgreSQL 8.0 or higher. 7.3 and 7.4 could be supported with some effort but
  13. will not work out of the box.
  14. * Any operating system that supports the above environment.
  15. 2: What's New in 1.1.0?
  16. 2.1: Database changes:
  17. LedgerSMB 1.1 allows more flexibility in dataset creation. We now offer the
  18. ability to create the dataset and language with a different user than is used to
  19. populate the database. If the superuser field is left blank, it will try to
  20. populate an existing database, while if this field is filled in, it will try to
  21. create the database with this account and add plpgsql to it (if the language
  22. already exists, it will skip over that part).
  23. Database backups now use pg_dump. Some time ago, there were problems which
  24. resulted in sequences not being restored properly but these have been resolved
  25. in every version of PostgreSQL that we support. The backup code is now more
  26. robust and simple than it was in previous versions.
  27. A foreign key constraint was added to acc_trans.chart_id, and primary keys were
  28. added to the acc_trans and chart tables. These changes further tighten the data
  29. integrity controls and prevents invalid data from being entered into the
  30. database. Also, some database schema changes were added to prevent against
  31. duplicate (and ambiguous) transaction id's.
  32. Finally, a standard means was added to extend the SQL-Ledger database schema.
  33. To add a custom field to a table, use the following function:
  34. add_custom_field(tablename, fieldname, datatype);
  35. For example:
  36. select add_cutom_field('ap', 'milage_start', 'numeric');
  37. To drop a custom field, use drop_custom_field(tablename, fieldname). For
  38. example:
  39. select drop_custom_field('ap', 'milage_start');
  40. 2.2: Security
  41. Previous versions installed the software with a blank admin password. This
  42. password would often be left at its default, and when this happened, the
  43. application would not check the supplied password at all. To correct this
  44. problem, we have insituted a routine to require a password check when the admin
  45. password is blank.
  46. 2.3: Usability Changes
  47. The Sales Data report from Metatron Technology Consulting was added to this
  48. release of LedgerSMB. This report allows you to track sales and purchases in a
  49. given date range by good or service, and drill down into the AR and AP invoices
  50. in that time period that contain those items.
  51. Several changes have been made to check handling. These include notices printed
  52. on check stubs when the number of invoices exceeds a user defined number. Also,
  53. batch printing is now available for checks.
  54. It is now possible (though still difficult) to print directly to a printer from
  55. a Windows server.
  56. 3: Known Issues
  57. Reposting invoices is known to cause inaccuracies cost of goods sold and
  58. inventory accounts. This problem has been confirmed to affect SQL-Ledger 2.6.x
  59. as well and is caused by problems involving the de-allocation and trasaction
  60. reversal routines. It will be corrected in an upcoming release as we continue
  61. to re-engineer the application.
  62. 4: Differences between LedgerSMB and SQL-Ledger(TM)
  63. 4.1: Login name restrictions
  64. Logins in SQL-Ledger can contain any printable characters. In LedgerSMB these
  65. are restricted to alphanumeric characters and the symbols ., @, and -.
  66. 4.2: Session handling
  67. SQL-Ledger as of 2.6.17 uses session tokens for authentication. These tokens
  68. are based on the current timestamp and therefore insecure. Furthermore, these
  69. tokens are not tracked on the server, so one can easily forge credentials for
  70. either the main application or the administrative interface.
  71. LedgerSMB stores the sessions in the database. These are generated as md5 sums
  72. of random numbers and are believed to be reasonably secure. The sessions time
  73. out after a period of inactivity. As of the initial release both
  74. SQL-Ledger-style session ID's and the newer version are required to access the
  75. application. In future versions, the SQL-Ledger style session ID's will
  76. probably be removed.
  77. 4.3: Database Changes
  78. Under certain circumstances where the Chart of Accounts is improperly modified,
  79. it is possible to post transactions such that a portion of the transaction is
  80. put into a NULL account. LedgerSMB does not allow NULL values in the chart id
  81. field of the transaction.
  82. Also, the transaction amount has been changed from FLOAT to NUMERIC so that
  83. arbitrary precision mathematics can be used in third party reports. This ought
  84. to also allow SQL-Ledger to properly scale up better as SUM operations on
  85. floating points are unsafe for large numbers of records where accounting data is
  86. involved.
  87. 5: Roadmap
  88. The project has no defined roadmap but rather a list of tasks and objectives
  89. outlined in the TODO list. There are many projects here and there are always
  90. room for new ideas.
  91. 6: Get Involved
  92. Contributors should start by joining the LedgerSMB users and devel lists. Code
  93. contributions at the moment must be committed by either project maintainer and
  94. should be submitted either using the patches interface at Sourceforge or the
  95. devel mailing lists.
  96. Additionally, we can use help in QA, documentation, advocacy, and many other
  97. places.
  98. SQL-Ledger is a registered trademark of DWS systems and is not affiliated with
  99. this project or its members in any way.