[freeside-devel] International issues

[Mathieu Dimanche]

Hi everyone

First things first, let me introduce myself. I'm a french developper 
currently trying to find if freeside is the right tool I need to improve 
to have my current phone-business customers happy with a great solution 
to deal with their customers. As far as I've looked, freeside is really 
well thinked and just needs a few updates for me (and them) to use it 
flawlessly.

I'm "specialised" in PHP and straight C++, have a solid linux 
background, and am fairly accustomed to databases. I haven't ever coded 
perl in my life, but I believe it isn't a big deal since in 2 hours, I 
already coded modifications. Once you know how to code, syntax is the 
only thing you need to learn with a new language.

So, then, coming to the facts :

The main fact that disturbes me is that you guys (most of you I believe) 
are using the english language and the dollar currency, which bring some 
troubles for an european business to jump blindlessly in your vision of 
the tool. The 2 biggest problems I can see are :

1/ Database in us_ascii instead of UTF8, denying us the use of special 
characters (ie. accents in french, cyrillic alphabet, and so on). As an 
exemple, something like 40% of the french first-names do have at least 
an accent in them.

2/ For you, it is well assumed that a currency is written in a "$ 
XXXXXX.XX" format, which is really not the case with other currencies 
(Euro is written "XXX XXX XXX,XX €"

To try to solve (1), I created the postgres base in utf8 but had 
problems in the initial creation of the tables. To be more precise, it 
was during the import of the locales (country names I suspect), but I 
didn't go any further with this as I could imagine plenty of problems 
would arise :
* it requires to have all the html interface in UTF8 as well
* interaction with Perl templates and Tex templates should all be UTF8

Did anyone try to do something about that or has ideas on a roadmap or 
something ?


To try to solve (2), I made a little test, simply adding a new 
configuration value named "money_char_position" (select left|right) only 
used in the FS::cust_bill::print_latex() function and it seems to work 
well, but I'm not that pleased about the whole process.

There seems to be a good class to use everywhere, the Math::Currency 
class on cpan [1]. Encapsulating it in say a FS::Price object to 
automaticaly deal with our configuration variables could be nice. Also, 
it could be used everywhere a price is written (HTML interface, Perl 
Text Template, Tex templates, emails, and so on.) :
* FS::Price::getHTMLString()
* FS::Price::getTEXString()

Would someone object I try to code that kind of functionnality ?
Of course, having that would deprecate the "money_char" variable, but 
then, it's only useful in the html interface.

Also, as I remember, the default tex invoice template (and 
FS::cust_bill::print_latex() function as well) seem to rely on a Tex 
"/dollar" which should be renamed to a "/currencysymbol".


I also have a huge list of ideas of further improvements but haven't 
tried to investigate further for now.

And a last question... what is your policy about patches ? Do you prefer 
the "patch first, talk later" approch (as many OSS do) or the "please 
discuss and explain everything, and THEN code" ? ;)


Mathieu

[1] 
http://search.cpan.org/~jpeacock/Math-Currency-0.4502/lib/Math/Currency.pm