Skip to Content
  2. Mailing Lists
  3. Contributors
  4. Re: The future of oca/bank-payment

Archives

Contributors

Re: The future of oca/bank-payment

Re: The future of oca/bank-payment

Re: The future of oca/bank-payment

> I reviewed the account_payment_partner PR (https://github.com/OCA/bank-payment/pull/1439) and commented to explain again the drawback of keeping payment modes.
> That PR hides the standard fields behind a group, but if for any reason someone needs to use the standard fields, they end up with a very confusing user interface with duplicate Payment Method/Mode fields with almost identical names and meanings on partners and invoices.
If we want to continue using payment modes, we need a better solution to that problem.

I hope all the problems we have in Odoo are of this difficulty ;)

2 easy solutions:

- With the existing group, hide the fields being added with this module with groups="!group" clause.
- Add another security group, so you can select both, one, another or none fields to be shown.

> In "normal" open source projects, the main authors ensure the steering, and if some users are not happy with the direction taken they can fork.
> In that view, asking the main author (arguably Alexis in this case) to fork himself is a bit awkward.

I think he lost his rights not attending the project for years, being pinged continuously without any answer. Some non complete list of pings without answer:

https://github.com/OCA/bank-payment/pull/979#issuecomment-1304825620 (my large previous refactoring to use native account.payment object)

He has also refused several times to do forward-ports of his patches, or directly to not maintain the whole repository, because "he doesn't work on odd versions".

Regards.
by Pedro M. Baeza - 11:45 - 2 Apr 2025

Reference

  • The future of oca/bank-payment
    Hi everyone,

    The oca/bank-payment repository has the essential modules to prepare and generate SEPA (and more) payment orders for credit transfer and direct debit.

    Today, there are important decisions to make about the future of this module.

    18 months ago, Alexis de Lattre, (one of) the original authors of these modules, started a huge effort to modernize these modules and improve their overall quality.
    He explained his approach in this PR 1174 for 16.0  [1]. 
    Naturally, that PR was not merged because it came too late in the 16.0 release cycle. 

    Now Alexis continues this effort with a series of 18.0 pull requests, with the important addition that he proposes to replace the Payment Mode object by the now native object from Odoo. 

    In Odoo v18, Odoo SA introduced new "Payment mode" M2O fields in the "account" module (cf this commit [6]):
    - on res.partner : one property field "Customer Payment Method" and one property field "Supplier Payment Method"
    - on invoices (account.move) : one field "Payment Method", copied from res.partner and that can be modified
    Up to Odoo v17, these "Payment mode" fields were not native ; they were added by the OCA module account_payment_partner from OCA/bank-payment.
    These new native "Payment mode" fields use the model account.payment.method.line (which was introduced in v15).

    Migrating to use these native fields makes a lot of sense to align with Odoo to avoid duplication of fields and logic.

    For more context, There was some discussion in the 16.0 PR [1], the 18.0 migration issue [4], as well as [5].

    I personally very much welcome this effort as I think the quality of Alexis' work is excellent (as usual), and this will create a solid foundation for the future.
    Indeed, over the many years of history of these modules, the only significant refactoring was Pedro's important work to adapt them to use Account Payment, and these modules start to show their great age.

    Alexis' work can be tested on runboat PR 1406 for direct debit [2] and PR 1405 for credit transfer [3]. From the preliminary tests we have done at Acsone it works fine.

    Of course, such work is not a traditional migration, and is difficult to review due to the importance of the changes. This will also create some additional migration work for maintainers of modules that depend on it (for instance the migration from Payment Mode to native Payment Methods will require some effort, although not difficult).

    On the other hand, reaching the same result by incremental improvements is going to be impossible, because as soon as a module is merged it starts to be extended, and some evolutions will not be possible in a backward-compatible way.

    So Akretion and Acsone propose to add migration scripts, and merge Alexis' work in 18.0 and rapidly iterate from there to review and add possible features that would have been missed in the transition. At Acsone we plan to put significant effort on this repo in the coming 3-4 months.

    Would there be agreement on such an approach?

    Best regards,

    -Stéphane

    by Stéphane Bidoul - 11:45 - 26 Mar 2025