Re: Re: (OT) Perl Open Source accounting packages?

[Ovid]

Hi, Anonymous Monk. SQL Ledger was actually the very first package that we evaluated. We were very impressed with its long list of features. However, "features" are only part of the package. This is a short list from my initial review of the code.

• Poorly written
• Doesn't use strict
• Extensive use of global variables
• Has security concerns
• Is non-portable
• Hand-rolled template system
• Difficult to test
• Will be difficult to extend
• And guess how it handles CGI data ...

You are absolutely correct that OSS doesn't appear to have been terribly successful with accounting software. In the defense of the people responsible for SQL Ledger, the above list is not unique to their product.

Now, if only I could find an accounting package with a test suite ... any test suite.

Cheers,
Ovid

Update: Just to let people know that I am not being too picky, here's a sample of code from admin.pl in SQL Ledger.

# customization
if (-f "$form->{path}/custom_$form->{script}") {
  eval { require "$form->{path}/custom_$form->{script}"; };
  $form->error($@) if ($@);
}

You'll notice that we are using eval on data from a hashref named $form. As one can imagine, this data has been pulled (incorrectly) straight from a Web form. It is also tainted (or would be if taint checking were used). Due to how feature-rich this code is, working to track down all of the security holes (such as unvalidated and improperly quoted data being used in SQL statements) would take so much time that I'd rather start with a better written, but less feature-rich package.

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