Peter Sullivan said he was looking to add a page to the GNUe website on projects using GNUe - both other free software projects using the GNUe tools and people who use GNUe for private projects - not proprietary, just internal stuff that they have no intention of releasing.. Jason Cater said he was working on a GPL'd rental property management app called RentFree. It's really early in the development process, so it's not in a usable state yet. But, code does exist. Also, he used GNUe at NCS for our new in-house development in place of Oracle SQL-Forms. Eventually, we plan to get all our old apps converted over (at which point we will also switch to SAP-DB.) It is in production use here. Once the GNUe financial packages are usable, we will also switch from Great Plains to GNUe Financials. A second company I work for, Cambridge Marketing, is also rewriting their call center's software using GNUe tools. This has not gone into production use yet. My wife's "Off the Shelf" Bookstore in Olive Branch, MS, (a used book store) is using the GNUe tools for its backoffice operations -- currently using custom packages. If I can get a decently usable system, we will probably release this bookstore package under the GPL as well. Peter said he would like to include something about Via Libre and papo. And I know Codeworks.lt are using the GNUe tools for various internal projects, but I'm not sure whether these are public enough to go on the web page yet.

Alfredo Ricafort asked How do I modify window objects in the designer ? It seems that all the fields the designer, especially those in the Property Inspector, are all protected. The only fields that I can edit are the 'X','Y','Width' & 'Height'. Peter Sullivan said I think this is a known bug in wxpython - the GNUe developers have checked the GNUe code several times, and there is nothing obviously wrong with it. The easy workaround is to maximise your Designer window so that the scroll bars (horizontal and vertical) disappear, which should then make these fields editable again. Alfredo said For me, this workaround only works for 'Labels' and 'Boxes', but not for 'Unbound Entries' or 'Drop Downs'.

Frank Wegener asked about the HR-software, especially time & expense. Derek Neighbors explained We do not at this time have ready made packages for Human Resources. We gladly accept proposals and would be more than willing to work with you to develop something with our application framework so that we do have HR packages.

Further to , Reinhard Müller (reinhard) discussed some practical issues for arranging the meeting with Christian Selig (lupo). He explained that the topic should be about design issues and not about wild hacking - i guess we will discuss basic design of appserver. Christian agreed - appserver is really important by now - jan has obviously some concepts :). Reinhard agreed - i think the problem is most of us have some concepts - that's why we need to talk :). Jason Cater (jcater) wished he could go to frankfurt :( Reinhard warned they don't have donuts in frankfurt. Jason suggested someone take a camera. Christian wondered why Jason would want a picture of 4 hackers and a smart-alecks? Derek Neighbors suspected he wanted proof there are no donuts. Various doughnut-related jokes followed.

Some days later, Christian asked Arturas Kriukovas (Arturas) i've heard you'll join the meeting in frankfurt?. Arturas said he hoped to be there. Christian reported that their FSF Europe (Free Software Foundation) contact said he has no room but a corner. Reinhard said i might be able to find a conference room for about 10 people at an affordable price - if i find one then we can take that - if i don't find anything then we can come back to volker's corner. Christian volunteered to document the meeting, which can then be reused in the next kernel cousin.

Further to , Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) asked on IRC how's the countdown to release going? Jason Cater (jcater) said he was ready - except for the Win32 binaries as referred to in - they are kicking my arse.

Two days later, Derek Neighbors (dneighbo) was having problems with the third pre-releases - the wizards are horridly broken :( As he was meant to be doing a presentation the next day, he reverted to the old 0.3.0 releases in order to get something more stable. He was also pulling together some slides for the presentation - 2 CFO's are coming specifically to review gnue.

Later on, Jason Cater (jcater) said there's more to life than wizards - he hasn't used a wizard in months - you should learn how to use designer properly :) - although I do wonder who broke my wizards. Derek said that he had just been hoping to have working 0.4.0 so could demo gear and connection editor and other things i have heard so much about.

Jason confirmed that he had fixed the simple wizard in Designer, but I'll say if that's how you're designing forms you need to learn how to use designer :) Derek asked if Jason was implying that wizards arent a good way to use designer?. Jason said they are a way - /me hasn't used wizards since 0.3.0 - I designed a complete backend to LanePOS this past week using nothing but designer - plus a custom inventory system. Derek said he preferred wizard plus manilupation.

The next day, Jason said he was still hoping to get the Microsoft Windows .exe versions working, but they won't have support for interbase/firebird like I thought - /me thinks that either their win driver is missing a DLL - or a interbase/firebird dll is required - /me forgets which DLL it complains about - but I couldn't find reference anywhere on the net to it - so I'll worry about that at a later date :) He was also not including the SAP-DB drivers in the .exe version - the SAP-DB guys said I should be able to use the Python drivers under any Win32 but I can't find how to do that yet (may take a recompile or such).

Later, Jason asked can someone(s) (with broadband preferrably) grab a release tar.gz file he was uploading that is a binary image of our tools w/all dependencies - ala the OpenOffice setup program. It contains Designer, Forms, and Navigator - Reports was still too early a release, and AppServer would have to be separate. Derek Neighbors (derek) said you realize IF this works - we can have debs in like 10 minutes probably - same way flash and openoffice debs work - i.e. just put binaries in place and make menu entries and they will be just in unofficial debian :). Jason said if this works then it was totally worth the frustrations with the conversion to McMillan 5. Several people downloaded and untarred the file to test it, uncovering a few minor bugs, but nothing critical. Jason announced then we are officially released - hooya!. Derek agreed - we can always do a 0.4.1.

Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) asked is the short-term plan to get back to new features, or just bugfixing for a couple of weeks? Derek said plan is we need a roadmap asap - for at least 3 versions (even if rough) - i would say 0.4.0 only goest to 0.4.1 for security or grave bugs - we need a list for 0.5.0 of what features we want in 0.5.0 and any bugs we hope to squash in 0.5.0 that we know about - and we start going after those things.

Jason announced the new releases on the mailing list:

He explained All of these releases are targeted at developers. The five products are available in source form from our website at http://www.gnuenterprise.org/downloads/current.php. They had been tested and are known to run on:

There were also Windows installers for GNUe-Designer and GNUe-Forms that include all the basic dependencies -- you only have to download a single setup.exe! The Installers include support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and ODBC.

He gave the change logs for each tool, before adding that work on GNUe Integrator has commenced in CVS. GNUe Integrator will initially allow batch-mode transfers of data from one data source to another..

Jeff Bailey (jbailey) asked whether a new release of DCL was planned soon - I don't want to fix the Debian package for it only to find out I have to upgrade it in a week. Derek Neighbors (derek) said i was ready to release a new one last week and couldnt find you :) - dtm has cajoled me into doing some versioning and roadmapping so i was considering holding off - but if you are up to it maybe i can tweak out a new version with current fixes - and just plan on a x.x.X release shortly after with final wave of clean up. He noted that we plan on doing a fairly stable release then start refactoring head some - how will that work in Debian? If i do a 0.9.0 release in sid - then get some feedback and a few more fixes and release 0.9.1 - how long till that could be moved to sarge? so that we could get 1.0.0 debs ready shortly after? with new stuff from head? Jeff said that the criteria for moving packages from Debian unstable (sid) to Debian testing (as of time of writing, sarge) was 10 days bug free in sid. (plus it's dependancies, of coruse) - as of time of writing, there was only one "upstream" bug with the DCL Debian package.

Calum Morrell (drochaid) reported that the pre-releases web page was not working. Derek Neighbors (derek) and Jason Cater (jcater) fixed this, but Jason noted /me doesn't like this /downloads/current/ and /downloads/previous/ business as you frequently break links - you should also consider that once anyone gets us in any of the BSD ports - we'll break their ports code when we move. Derek sees value in current as so that people that are new arent confused :) - they agreed that the best solution was to have all the downloads together and just have the current releases as a sub-set of the full downloads.

Two days later, Peter Sullivan (psu) said that the new releases are now suitably announced on front page of the web site - all of the releases were in the /downloads/releases/ directory, but the current releases were also in /downloads/current. He felt It might not be so stupid an idea to go all Debian - and have a codename for each release set (given that the version numbers are and will be out of sync) - Then we could have a symlink for /current/ that just moved. Given the nature of this channel, I can imagine code names being from Star Wars rather than Toy Story ;-) If we were being really sophisticated we could use light-side-of-the-force names for Tools releases, dark-side names for packages - and anaikin/vader for the 1.0.0 release that brings everything together ;-). Jason preferred a doughnut-related theme - this is the Glazed release - next time, Chocolate - then Creme filled - oooo - lemon-filled. Peter noted that also we have things like bayonne and DCL that go w/own release schedules. Derek Neighbors (dneighbo) liked release names but seems silly except for 1.x 2.x 3.x type releases.

The next day, Reinhard Müller (reinhard) said release names - seriously i thought about that, too - and as we have some tolkien fans among us i could imagine bilbo, frodo, gandalf et al - like in debian. Daniel Baumann (chillywilly) said it's hard to choose between farscape names and tolkien names for computers ;) - I think farscape is winning though - I already have 'frell'.

Nick Rusnov (nickr) asked its possible to validate things in forms based on data in tables in the datasource, right? He gave the example of designing a form to allow users to select a terminal to reserve - so he selects all the unreserved terminals from the database and presents them as a list - the user sits there for 20 minutes trying to decide - in that amount of time, one of the terminals on his list of available ones has become reserved. Jason Cater (jcater) suggested have a trigger that is executed when they select their choice - and if no longer available - say, "your slow ass lost you this seat. try again.".

Charles Rouzer (Mr_You) asked how would you go about restricting data to the user? in other words, I only want a customer to have access to his information, not all customers ;-) Peter Sullivan (psu) said this needed Role-Based Access Control - RBAC is on the "To Do" list for Naviagtor and Project Papo were looking at doing something similar - as they need it soon, as discussed in Nick Rusnov (nickr) felt that rbac needs pervasive support, not just in the client side :) Peter said the current workaround was if the number of users isn't too bad - and your underlying d/b supports it - just use seperate d/b logins and views on the transaction tables - /me realises this isn't a feasible solution if you have 500+ users all with diff privs. Nick felt this was easy to bypass if the db doesn't prevent you itself..

Charles Rouzer (Mr_You) reported gnue-designer.exe won't start (0.4.0) - dunno if I need to reboot. Peter Sullivan (psu) said This is windoze, so that's always a possibility - but IIRC the windows installs are fairly clean (e.g. no registry mucking about) - as the aim was to make them network-installable, as discussed in . Charles uninstalled and reinstalled and designer and navigator still don't wor. This is with XP. Later, Jan Ischebeck (siesel) reported problems on Windows 2000 - the funny thing is that forms won't start from the console, but can be started by clicking on a forms file :(

The next day, Bajusz Tamás (btami) asked have you tried released .exe on any win32 ? i'v tried on XP and win2k, but both failed without any error msg. Arturas Kriukovas (Arturas) said he had not tried them yet - i'm trying to implement setup-cvs.py for windows as discussed in , so i'm planning to try everything then (in a week). Bajusz said that Microsoft Windows XP supported hard links, as required for a setup-cvs script. Arturas said i think we can iclude this util in our /common/tools (or how is that folder called) - so it'll work with 2k and XP - however for 9x and NT i have no ideas. Bajusz said it will work on 2k and XP definitely - couse it is filesystem related, depending on NTFS 5.

Dmitry Sorokin (ra3vat) reported that, on Windows 98, forms worked - designer no. However, translation does not work though. Arturas said he believed that gettext does not exist under windows - maybe it's possible some kind of workaround - but i guess we'll have to use English language only for Windows. However, he was not sure. Dmitry confirmed that his translations were working on GNU/Linux. Bajusz said that he had tried pygettext.py on win32 before - and it worked IIRC. Arturas said he would be able to look at it in a few days.

Later, Derek Neighbors (dneighbo) said fwiw: windows install is a dream its great - HOWEVER it is hosed wrt functionality - drop down box behavior is severely crippled - i will send bugs as i get a chance. It was asked if the problem could be that the images were not checked in to CVS as binary files. Derek thought this was VERY likely - /me thought we added some cvs rules to fix this, but likely only did it at the www/ directory and below.

Arjen Runsink (Suit) asked which version of wxGTK and wxPython is exactly needed for the new releases - The INSTALL file for forms talks about 2.2.2, but even Google does not know that version. James Thompson (jamest) said I'm using 2.2.9 - IIRC the win binaries are built w/ 2.3. Arjen said I am getting the sources, no problem compiling those. Last time I did that though I pulled my hair for not being able to get a compilable and runnable mixture of dependencies and GNUe and other stuff. He noted there does not seem to be a 2.2.9 version for wxPython - the latest 2.2. version mentioned in the changelog on the website is 2.2.5 the latest on sourceforge is 2.2.7. James, remembering , said yeah, that was a major pita, some of the distros used a non-released wx. However, whatever wx you installed for the GNUe Tools 0.3.0 releases should still work - unless things changed we work w/ any 2.2 and up.

Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) asked what's your opinion on GNUe release cycles? ;) Peter Sullivan (psu) said we seem to be about quarterly at the moment - which seems fine to me. Enough to make releasing a special event. Not so rare that the project looks dead. Also, at the moment, release staff == development staff - so every release is 1-2 weeks out of the devcl cycle. If we had a dedicated release team, I would say release monthly. Daniel Baumann (chillywilly) said hah, a dedicated release team - this is free s/w - there's no such thing ;) Peter said that eventually we might be able to get leading GNUe consultancy firms to sponser releases - "This release is brought to you by the letters Q and X, and Chillywilly Enterprises Inc."

Dan Bethe (dtm) asked what's the status of GNUe as a SOHO accounting app? such as compared to MyBooks or Quickbooks? Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) said that some people are very slowly working on it ;). Dan asked is it within sight? do they have a project plan or status page? Andrew said that not much of the work was being done on-line - it's a group of us here in dunedin looking at it - so more is done offline. Dan suggested adding a roadmap and a status page - lots of people want to know - is it anywhere near usable? Andrew said well, the first version is usable, but it's not GNUeified - it's a php/python hybrid - quite ugly but functional.

Andrew said there were no copyright headers on the code at the moment - it was just an internal project) - forms & stuff will be GPL. Dan asked why would they do that rather than spend $99 on MyBooks then? accounting is not something to just mess with. Andrew said the original author had developed it for his own use, and for his business.

Dan asked does it interoperate with anything, like a bank or other file formats? Daniel Baumann (chillywilly) said it's called OFX spport - or whatever that prorocol is - gnucash cvs supports it - you can dl transactions from a checking account. btw, there's a Free libofx or whatever too, iirc. Andrew asked if this might be something that GNUe common could have, or something like that? Dan said I think OFX is an xml format, and should therefore be fairly easy to integrate with GNUe.

Jason Cater (jcater) noted that the welcome page on the website said GNU Enterprise is a meta-project of the GNU Project, designed to collect Enterprise software for the GNU system in a single location (much like the GNOME project collects Desktop software). Especially since the word "GNOME" was a hyperlink, this might be misconstrued as implying that GNUe was part of GNOME. Derek Neighbors (dneighbo) agreed, saying i am one that made the analogy - as gnome and gnue are the only two meta projects of GNU project (and now dotGNU). Jason understood why you did the analogy - I just wonder if it'll backfire. Peter Sullivan (psu) said that he had put the "collecting" reference up front, as the three numbered paragraphs underneath were meant to relate to the tabbed sections across the top, but he appreciated Jason's point. He suggested removing the hyperlink to GNOME. I think a link somewhere on the front page to GNU is fair enough - but once again maybe further down.

Derek Neighbors (dneighbo) asked about doing cross-tab queries. Jason Cater (jcater) said this could be done using the reporting package but it's a pain in the ass - there may be a better way in recent versions. Derek said he needed integrator and reports like yesterday. Jason said reports is there - if we would just sit down and define the output tags :) - so we could do something useful with the output (like, um, print it :) - /me is using the mailmerge w/RTF feature extensively now.