Update October 2016: Current status of the project

There has not been a news update for the Open Source OpenPetra for ages. Nevertheless, the work has continued. Especially the friends at ICT have been busy working on stabilizing OpenPetra, and since December 2015 they are rolling out their internal version of OpenPetra to various offices around the world! That is a huge achievement, and reason to be thankful and proud (in a good way)!

One challenge has been to merge the changes from ICT back into the Open Source version of OpenPetra. Some bits are not needed for the Open Source OpenPetra, others are not allowed for licensing reasons. Some issues that are being solved in the closed ICT branch of OpenPetra deal with .NET remoting and database connections in AppDomains, which we don’t have in the Open Source version. Despite all that, we are now in sync again between the two OpenPetras, up to the latest July release. See the 2016-07 release on https://www.openpetra.org/download-openpetraorg

Unfortunately, there is still not a community around the Open Source OpenPetra. Therefore there has not been any progress on documentation, tutorials, and stabilizing the core functionality for a proper release. On the other hand, without that documentation and level of stability, it is hard to get people interested. Some people have expressed interest, and anyone is welcome to join us on the IRC or on the forum!

A lot of energy has gone into providing uptodate packages of Mono in Fedora and in Epel7 (for CentOS7). The effort was worth it: when CentOS 7.3 will be released probably around December 2016, then Mono 4.2 will be available in Epel7. You can already test it by enabling epel-testing. The aim is to not need a special copr repository or self hosted build of Mono to run OpenPetra in production on a CentOS server.

There has also been work on updating uncrustify to a newer version, which supports new features of C# 6. This project still has not been finished yet.

There are probably more things to mention, but hopefully the news updates will be more regular from now on…