Hello, my name is Ben Duncan and I am a consultant with the Mississippi State Supreme Court, Electronic Filing Division. ( https://courts.ms.gov/mec/mec.html )
I also have over 35 years in writing general accounting systems, as well as a past VAR for such systems as MCBA, RealWorld, AppGen, for various other systems.
We here at MEC, are investigation the usage of Tryton to create the accounting modules for fee, fines, restitution collection in both chancery and criminal courts.
I have some questions going forward:
Currently I have a laptop to experiment with that has OpenSuse 42.3 on it and the OpenSuse version is something like 4.2 of Tryton on python 2. Will that be sufficient to get us started?
We also have a plethora of virtual servers we can play with, all are Redhat 6.9. They are scheduled to be upgrades to RHEL 7 before the end of the year. Should we go ahead and start Tryton on RHEL 7 and which version of Tryton would be sufficient?
If you want to start developing with Tryton OpenSuse 42.3 should be fine. But you should use the current development version. Currently the development version is on freeze as there will be soon the release for version 4.8. So you can start developing on a version that will be the new stable version of Tryton in a few days.
I think RHEL 6 is shipped with Python 2.6 and Tryton does not support this Python version any more. So you should have RHEL 7 on your servers. Version 5.0 of Tryton which will be published in autumn this year will be Python 3 only.
We are running Tryton 4.2 on a RHEL 7 system with Python 2. We created a python virtual environment and installed the different needed packages with pip. Then we downloaded the source of Tryton and it’s modules, unpacked it, created the database and config-files and there we go.
Yes it’s a bit overwhelming when you just can do a pip install trytond. But using it this way, makes it (for me) easier to develop a module. Just copy or create a new directory in the modules directory and of you go.
If you don’t develop your own modules, just create a python virtual environment and do a pip install trytond. Pip will install the latest version of Tryton which in this case is 4.6. Some python packages are better installed outside the virtual environment as system-site-packeges because some of them need compiling using gcc (it goes automatically, but you need gcc to be installed).
Personally I would recommend to use 4.6 as there are several new features implemented or features extended and bugs fixed. That’s also the reason why we are upgrading our system to 4.6
Ben,
I am glad to see that you are considering Tryton. I am a Tampa-based attorney (as well as a programmer), and our 30-person law firm runs on a custom Tryton implementation. We’ve been using it since 2012 and I could not be happier with it. I would be happy to discuss it with you, if you like.