[freeside] I think I have this down....

[Tech Account]

> No, the instructions are skeletal at best.  Thanks; hopefully your outline
> will be useful!

The thing about the instructions is that they only cover the physical
software installation and not it's proper intent and use. If I get this
thing working, and have a chance to test it, I will write some docs which
will hopefully more clearly outline the way to use it correctly.

> Err, no.  You should not have to edit Conf.pm

Well, to put it simply, the shells config file doesn't work at all on EITHER
of my installations. They are both completely up to date with perl, apache,
and freeside. I found this hard path for the config files which points to
/config/directory
Which isn't correct, since such a thing doesn't exist in any form on either
box, nor is mentioned anywhere in the docs. In a desperate attempt to get
the thing working, I changed this path to /usr/etc/freeside and things
started to work better. That was the ONLY change that I made. However,
Shells still didn't work, and since your error message doesn't tell me
WHERE it is actually looking for the shells file, all I could do was
change a simple line of code to kludge around it.
No, of course this isn't the proper thing to do, but it actually works.

> Reporting them is still useful; it helps me make the error messages more
> informative.  :)

Freeside suffers from but one problem, freeside reports the same error no matter
WHAT is wrong. Making the error useful and easy to debug is matter of passing
some of the variables in the program out to the real world, then people could
tell you exactly whats wrong without any effort at all. Saying that someone
has a bad shell for example, without telling them shell not found in:
/usr/local/etc/freeside/shells isn't of much use, since they could have a 
number of errors, a bad shell entry, a missing shells file, a bad shells
path, or another problem. Currently, if you have a package problem you can
still add a user without a package, but if you go to order one, the order
cancel screen can be blank, when it should report that no packages are
currently configured for use. Specifically I hadn't linked any packages
to agents! Without docs to know that I had to have working agents to sell
packages, and that if I added a package AFTER I had the agent around then
I could not use the package, life is very difficult. With terribly generic
error messages it's very hard to find such issues.

In any case, I'll try to document more fully such things.
I'm still interested in a solution to add onetime charges to a given
customer account...Freeside appears to have most of the setup and
config account work done, and much less flexibility in the billing side.

-Techy