Dear OCA collaborators,
as a follow up to the lightning talk at the OCA codesprint today, let me
expand on my ideas.
The OCB project (https://github.com/oca/ocb) was created in a time when
Odoo itself was a lot more unstable and many core bug fixes needed to be
included in a production instance. It was a feast to collaborate with
the OCA community to share the effort and enjoy the benefit of each
other's fixes. Nowadays, there is a lot less interest in the project.
Not a lot of PRs are proposed, mainly I feel because Odoo itself is a
lot more stable, and smaller changes from the community are adopted more
quickly in the core project. Meanwhile on OCB, not a lot of reviews are
being posted either and some of the PRs that are still being proposed
are not valid against the policy of stability, as they would create
incompatibilities with Odoo (defined as: does a change allow the
creation of community modules that are compatible with OCB but not with
Odoo or the other way around).
It thus seems that the OCB project outlived its usefulness. My
suggestion would be to freeze the OCB project: no branch for 10 will be
created, and no more merges will take place on the existing branches. We
can still keep merging the upstream changes to the existing branches as
a form of limited support.
This would free up some resources for a replacement project. I would be
very interested for the OCA to host a version of Odoo that does allow
for more radical changes to the Odoo core. Currently, the ideas in the
community on what could be improved in the Odoo core just get lost,
because Odoo SA is not very open to them, and neither is OCB. I would
like to see what the community members come up with, and see if this
leads to a more vibrant project. Some restrictions would still apply of
course. If an improvement could be made in a separate addon, there would
be no reason to include it in the project.
As a part of the project, we would have to think about managing
dependencies, as it might be the case that community modules are created
that are only compatible with this new version (or worse, when
incompatibilities are introduced that break additional modules). We
would also have to think about clearly documenting the changes and
providing an upgrade path to later versions of the project.
Please share your thoughts on the topic.
Regards,
Stefan
--
Opener B.V. - Business solutions driven by open source collaboration
Stefan Rijnhart - Consultant/developer
mail: stefan@opener.am
tel: +31 (0) 20 3090 139
web: https://opener.am
