LWN: Comments on "Trying Tryton"

Trying Tryton

cedric.krier — Thu, 14 Dec 2017 21:30:53 +0000

Thanks for reviewing Tryton. I'm one of the main developers of Tryton.
We are sorry to hear that Tryton is not a solution that suits your needs. We are well aware that Tryton is not yet a turn-key solution but more a platform to build business application for now. But we would like to improve it to be more ready to use. For this purpose, we would be happy to get more review on the missing features and/or misbehavior in this context. Our forum is open to anyone who want to discuss about them: https://discuss.tryton.org/

Trying Tryton

corbet — Thu, 14 Dec 2017 16:13:53 +0000

Installation isn't an issue; I don't think that software should be judged based on whether there's a convenient package available for a specific distribution. The real problem is that, even working perfectly out of the box, Tryton isn't aimed at the use case in question.

Trying Tryton

saxa — Thu, 14 Dec 2017 16:10:10 +0000

>> I imagine Tryton would work better in Debian or Ubuntu. Too bad the author ran out of time or interest to try it there.

I think that LWN is looking for something working right out of the box, at least minimally. Now I would assume as they wrote that no user would try to install another distro just to have a software working better. It is not very well thought if you think it that way.

Trying Tryton

SISalp — Thu, 14 Dec 2017 10:08:51 +0000

Thank you for this review of Tryton.

In Tryton community, we are aware of the difficulty to start with Tryton.

The first attempt to make it easy was a single-user application (client+server+sqlite) embedded as an office software called NESO. NESO support was dropped because of lack of interest and difficulty to maintain up-to-date packages. I think it would have fit well for your test.

An alternative solution has been to provide free hosting, so no installation is required at all (http://sisalp.com, I'm the operator of this site). It comes with an installation and management web page. Advantage is that hosting provides also basic security and backup. It allows you to test Tryton and use it for some time (not limited), enough to decide if it is worth installing it on your own server and bring back your data.

Recently a docker image has been made available at the central repository. Nevertheless, it requires also server admin skills for first installation and minimal maintenance.

Some contributors proposed tutorials about basic installation but for specific kinds of installation (usually not production) and we still consider this as an on-going task among other topics to improve the user documentation and translate in different languages. All contributors are welcome.

Thank you again for this review of Tryton which lacks the notoriety it deserves.

old version in Fedora

sharkcz — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 21:37:40 +0000

I would more than welcome a helping hand in maintaining the Tryton packages in Fedora, but none has appeared yet ...

Trying Tryton

pilou — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 12:13:53 +0000

About Python 3 compatibility:

server (trytond and modules) is Python 3 compatible since Tryton 4.4 released in may 2017 (Tryton 4.6 supports Python 3.6).
GTK tryton client isn't compatible with Python 3

Note there is a Web interface available since Tryton 3.8.

Tryton is primarily a framework. For example, an insurance ERP is based on Tryton. GNU Health, a free Health and Hospital Information System, is based on Tryton too. If there is an accounting module for your country, it can be used as an accounting software. There are (upstream) accounting available modules for Belgium, French, German and Spanish.

The following modules are sufficient for a french IT freelance: account, account_fr, account_invoice, account_statement, company, country, currency, party, party_siret, product.

Annual community event is taking place now.

old version in Fedora

rathann — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 09:54:59 +0000

Thanks for the article and sorry you had bad experience with the Fedora package. Would you mind filing a bug at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=Fedora&... describing your issues and requesting an update?

Trying Tryton

corbet — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 21:48:32 +0000

Indeed, I tried to carefully express that Tryton isn't "bad", it's just not aimed at this use case.

Odoo, FWIW, is more oriented toward the small-business accounting use case. It has a lot of features missing for commercial reasons, but a real effort has been made to have it work out of the box and be reasonably easy to work with.

Trying Tryton

debacle — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 21:45:26 +0000

Thanks for continuing your series about free software business accounting!

Without knowing much about Tryton, I have the feeling, that the review does it a little bit of injustice. There is a use case, i.e. "SMB accounting", but it is clear from the beginning, that both Tryton and Odoo are business application platforms, not applications. If I understand correctly, such systems are always a kind of workbench. That is the whole business case for thousands SAP and Oracle consulting companies. I'm clearly not an expert on those things, but I would try GnuCash (what you did), LedgerSMB, and PostBooks. At least from their short description they look more like applications, not platforms, to me.

Anyway, an interesting read!

PS: It seems, that Debian unstable has relatively recent version of all mentioned programs, but Odoo.

Trying Tryton

corbet — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 15:32:56 +0000

I can fully believe it might work better on a different platform. I didn't have a Debian box handy to try it on, but it doesn't matter: I'd seen enough to understand that Tryton, for all its virtues, was not intended for the use case at hand.

Trying Tryton

jbicha — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 04:09:12 +0000

I imagine Tryton would work better in Debian or Ubuntu. Too bad the author ran out of time or interest to try it there.

Trying Tryton

shiftee — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 09:26:34 +0000

I came across Tryton when reading about GNU Health (http://health.gnu.org).
I installed the Ubuntu packages and accessed the GNU Health demo database.
If I remember correctly the Ubuntu 16.04 version was too old to access the database but the version in 17.04 worked nicely