- Make sure nobody is using RevBank.
- Make a backup of your RevBank data and code repo(s).
- Read this file :)
Note that the changes to revbank.products do NOT apply to revbank.market
and other files.
TL;DR: Product descriptions now need "quotes" around them.
This version comes with breaking changes to the revbank.products syntax, to
expand the capabilities of the file in a more future-proof way. Bitlair
(Hackerspace Amersfoort) has requested a way to add metadata to products for
automation, which together with recent other additions to the format, made
clear a more structured approach was needed.
The line format for the products file is now like the input format of the
command line interface. This means that if product descriptions contain spaces,
as they typically do, quotes are needed around them. You can pick between
"double" and 'single' quotes. Any backslashes and quotes within the same
kind of quotes need escaping by adding a \ in front, e.g. \" and \\.
# Old format:
product_id 0.42 Can't think of a good description +addon1 +addon2
# New format, recommended style:
product_id 0.42 "Can't think of a good description" +addon1 +addon2
# Automatically generated? You may wish to quote all fields:
"product_id" "0.42" "Can't think of a good description" "+addon1" "+addon2"
# Escaping also works:
product_id 0.42 Can\'t\ think\ of\ a\ good\ description +addon1 +addon2
To convert your revbank.products file to the recommended style automatically,
you could use:
# The following is one command. It was obviously not optimized for readability :)
perl -i.backupv6 -ple'unless (/^\s*#/ or /^\s*$/) {
my ($pre, $desc) = /(^\s*\S+\s+\S+\s*)(.*)/; $pre .= " " if $pre !~ /\s$/;
my @a; unshift @a, $1 while $desc =~ s/\s\+(\S+)$//;
$desc =~ s/([\"\\])/\\$1/g; $_ = "$pre\"$desc\"";
for my $a (@a) { $_ .= " +$a" }
}' revbank.productsNote that this will leave commented lines unchanged! If those contain disabled products, you'll have to add the quotes yourself.
After the description field, you can add hashtag fields. These begin with #
and may take the form of a lone #hashtag, or they may be used as a
#key=value pair. The hashtags can be read by plugins. Out of the box, they
currently do nothing.
8711327538481 0.80 "Ola Liuk" #ah=wi162664 #q=8
8712100340666 0.45 "Ola Raket" #ah=wi209562 #q=12
5000112659184,5000112658873 0.95 "Coca-Cola Cola Zero Sugar (33 cl)" #sligro +sb
# equivalent:
"8711327538481" "0.80" "Ola Liuk" "#ah=wi162664" "#q=8"
See https://github.com/bitlair/revbank-inflatinator/ for a possible use of adding metadata.
This version comes with breaking changes to the command line syntax, to shield overconfident users of the interface for advanced users from several classes of common mistakes, and to add support for quoted and escaped strings to this interface.
Basically, you can now use ; to separate multiple commands on a single line
of input, and in some cases this is mandatory.
Historically, RevBank has allowed almost every character as a valid character, because it wasn't known if these would show up in barcodes. In more than 13 years of real world use, though, it seems that barcodes and usernames with "special" characters are incredibly uncommon.
Since ' " \ ; now have special meanings, they are no longer supported in
product IDs. In theory, they could be quoted or escaped, but barcode scanners
don't know that. Existing users with those characters in their names can
continue to use their accounts by quoting or escaping them.
New usernames must now only contain the characters from the set
A-Z a-z 0-9 _ - + / ^ * [] {} and the first character must not be any of
- + / ^ *.
When providing multiple commands on a single line, RevBank now requires a
separating ; after commands that finalize transactions, and after commands
that take arguments.
End-users are guided interactively to deal with the change, but automated
commands require changing. Specifically, add a ; between a multi-word command
and the final username (e.g. give *lasercutter 10; xyzzy) and in between
transactions.
- The undocumented feature
ROLLBACK_UNDOis gone. Usereturn ABORTin a function calledhook_undoinstead. - Plugins are now evaluated with an implicit
use v5.32;which enables many new Perl features and disables some old ones. Specifically, the old-style "indirect object notation" is disabled, which means thatnew Foo(...)should be rewritten asFoo->new(...). $cart->checkoutnow throws an exception if there is unprocessed input in the queue (the user can use;if it was intentional). There were always reasons a checkout could fail, but now it is much more likely. Things that should only happen if the checkout succeeds, should be put after the call, or in a hook.
Accounts that begin with * are now special: like hidden accounts, they do not
count towards the grand total, but unlike hidden accouns, they can be used as
normal user accounts too.
The intended application is for liabilities accounts that are also used directly for revenues and expenses.
They can be used with or without the * prefix, e.g. the account
*lasercutter can also be used as lasercutter. Such accounts cannot be
created from within the software: to create a user-accessible special account,
you need to edit revbank.accounts manually.
When upgrading, check that no accounts beginning with * already exist.
Transaction IDs are now sequential for better auditability. In previous versions, they were timestamps (unix time minus 1.3e9).
Because of this change, you must restart every running RevBank instance or else the transaction IDs will no longer be monotonic between processes, which would be bad.
You should choose which transaction IDs you want, and write your choice to a
file called .revbank.nextid.
If you don't write a .revbank.nextid file, RevBank will create one for
you, but you might not like it. It will generate one more timestamp based ID
and then increment that for subsequent transactions. This has the advantage of
not having the one-time break of monotonicity, but you will be stuck with the
long IDs and they will no longer convey time information.
Anything that works with Perl's ++ operator will work, and that gives a few
options. If you want to start over with transaction ID 1, write that to the
file:
echo 1 > .revbank.nextidYou can also use padding zeroes if you like. They will safely overflow to use an extra digit after all-nines is reached:
echo 00001 > .revbank.nextid(You can also use alphanumeric IDs, but I'm not sure if you should.)
Or, if you still have all the logs from since you started using RevBank, you can pretend RevBank has always had simple incremental transaction IDs and use the number of distinct transaction IDs from the log file as the basis for the next ID:
# This is my personal preference
perl -lane'BEGIN { $max = time() - 1.3e9 }
/^\d+$/ and $_ > 0 and $_ < $max and $x{$_}++ for @F[1, 2];
}{ print 1 + keys %x' .revbank.log > .revbank.nextid
# Note: use multiple filenames (e.g. .revbank.log*) if you rotate log files
# (like when you have yearly logs).This is safe because the timestamp based IDs were huge and are unlikely to overlap at least the next few decades.
Finally, for those who really don't want to change the scheme now, the old
system can be retained by writing the special-cased value LEGACY. This
feature will be supported at least until 2024-01-01, but might be removed after
if nobody tries to convince me otherwise.
echo LEGACY > .revbank.nextidThere are a few new plugins that you may wish to enable. Some have been around longer than RevBank 3.9, but haven't been mentioned in UPGRADING.md before.
Automatically calculate and set aside VAT ("BTW" in Dutch) on generated
revenue. You will probably not need this. Before enabling this plugin, read the
documentation in plugins/vat.pod first.
To support GS1 Digital Links and other GS1 barcodes. The DL are a new way for
QR codes that contain product IDs and other metadata while also being usable
for promotional stuff. At least one popular brand of soft drinks is already
using them. There's a huge standard that describes these codes, but basically,
they're URLs with /01/ and a 14-digit product ID in them. Enabling this plugin
is probably useful and harmless; add it to revbank.plugins after plugins
that deal with product IDs like products and market.
Replaces custom SHA2017/MCH2022 angel badge hacks. Add after users in
revbank.plugins after removing your custom plugin for angel- barcodes.
Add before adduser in revbank.plugins. This will inform new users that
RevBank is insecure by design and what implications that can have. Enabling
this plugin is recommended.
Charge and refund container deposit return ("statiegeld" in Dutch). Read the
documentation in plugins/statiegeld.pod and plugins/statiegeld_tokens.pod
for instructions.
If you have an electronic cash drawer, copy or change this plugin and add code to trigger it whenever something is done that involves cash.
RevBank has supported "doubly entry bookkeeping" since version 3.4 last year. For backwards compatibility with custom plugins, support for unbalanced transactions was retained.
Support for unbalanced transactions will be removed after 2024-06-10, after a period of 2 years after the introduction of balanced transactions. If you're using custom plugins, grep your log file for the text "UNBALANCED ENTRY" to see if changes are needed.
A tiny change that could break things: the shebang was changed from
#!/usr/bin/perl to the more modern #!/usr/bin/env perl.
In the unlikely event that your system has multiple perl executables in the
search path of PATH, this change could mean that revbank now uses a different
perl, in which case you may have to reinstall the required Perl libraries.
Background: NixOS doesn't follow the previously uni(x)versal convention that,
when Perl is available, an executable exists at /usr/bin/perl. The only
stable paths that NixOS provides for shebangs are #!/bin/sh or
#!/usr/bin/env. There were always pros and cons to switching the shebang to
env (e.g. for use with perlbrew), but learning about Nix has tipped the
scales for me. (The performance penalty is not relevant for RevBank.)
Deduplication is moved from individual plugins to a plugin that does that. If
you want to keep deduplication of cart items, and you probably do want that,
add deduplicate to revbank.plugins just below repeat.
The deprecation warning was moved from the withdraw plugin to a new plugin
called deprecated_raw. If you're upgrading from an older versions and some of
your users have been around since before the withdraw/unlisted split, you may
want to keep the deprecation warning. But for new RevBank installations it does
not make sense. To keep providing these warnings to users that enter raw
amounts, add deprecated_raw to the very end of revbank.plugins.
The edit command is now in its own plugin, so that it can be disabled (this
has been requested several times). To keep the ability to edit the products
list from within RevBank, add edit to revbank.plugins.
Added 2024-01-20 v6.0.0: if you're upgrading to v6.0.0 from a version before v3.6, instead of following these instructions, you can just add quotes to the descriptions (when using the perl oneliner from the v6.0.0 upgrade instructions, check if any
+somethingthat got placed outside of the quotes should have been within the quotes.)
There's new syntax for revbank.products: addons. Check that your lines don't
have +foo at the end, where foo can be anything.
Also check that you don't have any product ids that start with +; those can
no longer be entered as this syntax now has special semantics.
So these don't work as before:
example_id 1.00 Example product +something
+something 1.00 Product id that starts with plus
example,+alias 1.00 Alias that starts with plus
These will keep working as they were:
example_id1 1.00 Example product+something
example_id2 1.00 Example product + something
more_stuff 1.00 Example product with +something but not at the end
bbq 1.00 3+ pieces of meat
There are several new features that you may wish to take advantage of. By combining the new features, powerful things can be done that previously required custom plugins.
The syntax for revbank.products has become complex. Please refer to the new
documentation in products.pod for details.
Support for non-positive prices was requested several times over the years and has now finally been implemented.
It's now possible to have a product with a negative amount, which when "bought" will cause the user to receive money instead of spending it.
It is now possible to add products to products, which is done by specifying
+foo at the end of a product description, where foo is the id of another
product. This can be used for surcharges and discounts, or for bundles of
products that can also be bought individually.
By default, products sold via the products plugin, are accounted on the
+sales/products contra account. This can now be overridden by specifying
@accountname after the price in revbank.products. For example,
1.00@+sales/products/specificcategory. While this will mess up your tidy
columns, you may be able to get rid of a bunch of custom plugins now.
When the specified contra account is a regular account (does not start with +
or -), this works similar to the market plugin, but without any commission
for the organization.
The pfand plugin, that was originally written as a proof-of-concept demo, has
been removed without deprecation cycle. To my knowledge, nobody uses this
plugin. If you did use it, just grab the old version from git. Please let me
know about your usecase!
The introduction of beverage container deposits in The Netherlands has triggered reevaluation, and several things about that plugin were wrong, including the condescending comments that bottle deposits for small bottles would be crazy or wouldn't make sense in a self-service environment. RevBank was too limited to support it properly, but I think current RevBank fulfills all requirements for making a better, proper pfand plugin.
If you get Perl warnings from a plugin, and don't want to fix the issues with the code (or disagree with the warning), just add "no warnings;" to the top of the plugin file. However, the warnings are often indicative of suboptimal code that is ground for improvement!
Most warnings will be about unitialized (undefined) values. Some guidance for
Perl newbies: you can test whether something is defined with if (defined($foo)) { ... }, or provide a default value with $foo // "example default value".
RevBank now has a simple built-in text editor for products and market; rationale in lib/RevBank/TextArea.pod.
This comes with a new dependency, the perl module Curses::UI (debian: libcurses-ui-perl).
RevBank now has built-in hidden accounts and balanced transactions (double-entry bookkeeping). These accounts will be made automatically, and hidden from the user interface.
If you have scripts that parse .revbank.log or revbank.products, you may
want to ignore all accounts that start with - or +.
In the hopefully very unlikely event that you have existing user accounts that
start with - or +, those will have to be renamed manually, as such accounts
are no longer accessible.
For your custom plugins, you may want to add ->add_contra calls to every
$cart->add call that does not already have them. Unbalanced transactions will
probably be deprecated in a future version.
The new cash plugin will display messages about how much the cash box should
hold, whenever someone withdraws or does a cash deposit. For that to make
sense, this requires the deposit_methods plugin to be enabled, and to have
a "cash" deposit method.
When adding the cash plugin in revbank.plugins, make sure it is listed
before stock if you have that one too. And you probably want to enable
the skim plugin too, which introduces the (hidden) commands skim and
unskim which can be used to keep the cash box data synchronised when someone
(probably a board member) skims it.
Raw amounts without a command are no longer supported. There was already an
explicit command for unlisted products, unlisted, and for withdrawals there
is now the new command withdraw. An explanatory message guides users who
use the old style towards the new commands.
This change makes it possible for treasurers to more accurately deduce the intention of a revbank transaction.
When upgrading, make sure the unlisted plugin is installed in
revbank.plugins. Without it, the instruction text presented when someone
enters an amount is wrong and the functionality for paying for unlisted
products is lost.
Test your custom plugins. If they don't emit warnings about floating point numbers, or if you don't care about warnings, then no changes are required.
RevBank no longer uses floating point numbers for amounts. Instead, there are now RevBank::Amount objects, which internally store an integer number of cents, but externally stringify to formatted numbers with 2 decimal places.
To create such an object, use parse_amount as per usual.
Formatting no longer requires sprintf %.2f, just use %s instead.
Using an amount as a floating point number will now emit warnings in some
cases, to alert you to the fact that this may result in rounding errors.
To convert an amount to a floating point number without a warning, use
$amount->float. To convert a floating point number to an amount without a
warning, use RevBank::Amount->new_from_float($float).
Most hard-coded uses of floats are safe enough and transparently supported through overloaded operators, but if there are more than 2 decimal places, the operation will be disallowed.
The following features were removed:
-
plugins
nyanandgamePlease remove these from your
revbank.pluginsconfiguration file. -
creating new accounts with
depositUse
adduserinstead.
Method has been removed.
Method has been removed.
Delete a specific entry, as returned by $cart->entries, instead.
Use add_entry and added_entry instead, which gets a RevBank::Cart::Entry
object, instead.
Note that the new "entries", unlike old "items", can have a quantity other
than 1.
The add method now always creates an entry from the perspective of the
current user, and returns a RevBank::Cart::Entry object to which "contras" can
be added with add_contra. The contras can be used for counteracting a value
with an operation on another account.
To upgrade a plugin that does a single add with undef as the first
argument, simply remove the undef, . When multiple items were added that
belong together, consider using add_contra for the subsequent lines; see the
take and give plugins for examples.
Use entries instead, which takes the same kind of argument. Note that
entries work slightly differently: they can have a quantity and attached contra
entries. Attributes are now accessed through the has_attribute and
attribute methods, instead of directly manipulating the hash.