OCA Update

The New OCA Way

As the Odoo Community Association (OCA) approaches its 10th anniversary, reflecting on its remarkable journey reveals a decade of commitment to fostering an Open Source ecosystem around Odoo. Originating during a period of uncertainty regarding Odoo S.A. politics, the OCA emerged as a neutral entity, uniting the expertise of the most skilled Odoo integrators. The primary goal was clear—to crystallise contributions under a neutral umbrella, ensuring their perpetual Open Source nature and facilitating collaboration among contributors and association members.

Over the years, the OCA has achieved significant milestones, boasting the development and maintenance of over 3500 modules under an Open Source license. Renowned for their technical quality and reliability, OCA Apps undergo a rigorous review process, making them the most trustworthy applications on the Odoo App store. Beyond technical excellence, the OCA has played a crucial role in reducing maintenance costs for end customers, resulting in substantial savings for contributors' clientele.

As the association looks forward to its future, there is a recognition that the landscape is evolving. Despite the remarkable accomplishments of the past decade, there is a sense that the OCA must adapt to the changing times to maintain its relevance within the Odoo ecosystem. With 2024 marking a pivotal moment in the association's history, there is a collective determination to engage more robustly and grow, ensuring the OCA's sustained impact and influence in the years to come.

OCA Being Mighty

OCA Runboat updated to please the functional girls and guys!

Testing a module on a runboat for a repo with tens of modules (eg: sale-workflow, purchase-workflow, stock-logistics-warehouse, ...) is like going to a restaurant to try out how a single ingredient - let's say olives - tastes on pizza, but the only pizza in the menu is one with all possible ingredients in the kitchen. It's unlikely you will leave the restaurant with an opinion on olives.

To solve this issue, Stéphane Bidoul, our runboat magician, proposed to to always let runboat install a build with only "base" so you can select between the full and base-only database when connecting.

This was actually done the same day the functional team made this request.

A big thank you to Stéphane and Happy Testing to everyone!

Details are available in this PR issue: https://github.com/orgs/OCA/discussions/126

Phasing out older branches and tooling

As we mentioned on the mailing list, the time has come to say goodbye to older tooling.

Python 2 has reached end of life 3 years ago now and it is becoming harder and harder to support tooling that depends on it. 

We have therefore decided to stop supporting Odoo 8, 9 and 10. This means that the OCA GitHub bot will not process these branches anymore, weblate will stop synchronizing these branches and the addons updates will not be published to PyPI anymore for these branches.

Branches 8, 9 and 10 remain available for ad-hoc collaboration and manual merges, but without OCA infrastructure support.

We are also stopping Travis CI end archiving OCA/maintainer-quality-tools. You served us well, farewell and a huge thank you to everyone who helped with this toolchain over the years.

Projects still using Travis for branches 11 to 14 can easily switch to the new OCA addons repo template

Repository Maintainers

You can now see our repositories and maintainters easily online. You'll find all our current teams here: https://oca.github.io/repo-maintainer-conf/

Open Upgrade Documentation

In recent months, we have undertaken a significant project aimed at enhancing the documentation for OpenUpgrade, focusing on providing clear guidance on implementing migration scripts and fostering collaborative efforts. Our primary objective was to streamline the onboarding process for new contributors, facilitating a smoother pathway for them to address their common challenges. 

Over the past few months, Sylvain Le Gal has dedicated extensive effort to revamping the documentation, refining its structure, and simplifying the navigation for users seeking guidance on migration procedures. We hope that these improvements will prove valuable to a wide array of collaborators, empowering them to efficiently address their needs within the OpenUpgrade framework.

We invite you to explore the new OpenUpgrade documentation on our website (https://oca.github.io/OpenUpgrade/index.html). Here, you'll witness Sylvain's refactoring, encompassing key sections such as 'How to Perform a Migration?'

We hope that these enhancements will empower user experience, fostering continued collaboration within the OpenUpgrade community.

Cover photo by Jay Wennington on Unsplash