Re: [SL] Adding extra custom reports

[Ed W <li...@wi...>]

Hi Chris

Thanks for the pointers


> We've got plans for a whole slew more
> reports, with a lot of near-working code I believe. So, if your report
> is something that needed you might have some help building it, but at
> the very least you will get some advice on how to do it.
>   

I made some changes to the Latex reports (with Dieters help I might add) 
to consolidate quite large chunks of it into a single place.  The idea 
was that the address layout, footer, header, etc were standard across 
most of the reports and so it made customisation a lot easier when you 
can change it in only one please

Dieter, although my comments were out of order on a public list (please 
accept my apologies), I do think that if you are serious about 
benefiting from an open source model then you need to encourage people 
to contribute changes back to you in order to benefit.  Otherwise all 
the benefit for sure is on our side that we get the code, but there is 
no major benefit for you in giving me the code?

There have been a number of occasions that I have felt I would like to 
contribute to the SL project, but I haven't found it easy to get either 
a leg up, or some help with a bit of polishing and so most of the work 
has fallen by the wayside (I have a full time job, this stuff is just 
part-time).

I have for example submitted one (incomplete) patch to ammend the way 
the reconciliation function shows information and yet despite some 
positive feedback on the list I didn't even get an acknowledgement that 
you had received my personal email about it?!  I haven't progressed the 
work because I don't want to run my own private version and it's not 
worth my time if my changes will not be accepted (which is how I took 
your complete silence)

Additionally I have tried several times to report a bug (and debug it) 
where stock gets lost if one uses the "shipping receive/sent" functions, 
then ammend and reports the related order/invoice.  On about three 
occasions my messages on this subject appeared to be blocked from the 
list and I didn't receive any response from personal messages to you 
other than a single message that you didn't believe that it was happening?

For other peoples reference, my years "updates" to the SL manual have 
recently expired, but I did buy one version of the book around 14 months 
ago.

Dieter, I'm sorry that my budget doesn't seem to suit your prices.  I 
have deliberately offered to pay for several bits of work in the past, 
and I most definitely *do* have a budget to spend on this software, but 
considering that high quality alternatives such as Sage exist for only 
2-3x the price of an SQL-Ledger manual I really struggle to put up 
$12,000 (!) for a change to the tax calculation as per your quote.


For others reading list, please do note that Dieter *has* been very 
helpful to me in the past, and I do not wish to imply that he has not.  
However, I *do* hope that he will take a hard look at the recent fork 
and try to merge in the improvements made there into the SL codebase and 
take onboard this source of new coding effort.

My apologies again for the inappropriate post to the list

Ed W


P.S. Since I have now blown all chances of getting Dieter to do this 
work, if anyone is interested in paid work to implement changes to the 
SL fork to make it easier to work with UK VAT then please contact me 
offlist...