Fork l10n_fr ?

[alexis-via]

The branch 14.0 of this project is red due to a huge change in the official module l10n_fr on October 7 odoo/odoo@85a634c
The commit landed in Odoo after the merge of this PR odoo/odoo#84918 made by Julien Van Roy, an employee of Odoo SA (https://www.linkedin.com/in/julien-van-roy-05a53a146/)

This commit broke l10n_fr_account_tax_unece because XMLIDs were changed on several taxes. As a consequence, the branch origin/14.0 is now red.

But the problem is no so much that the 14.0 branch of OCA/l10n-france turned red without notice ! The problem is that Odoo SA continued the crazy evolution on taxes: before this commit, l10n_fr created 54 taxes by default, which was already a lot... now there are 66 taxes by default ! In my tweet about this (https://twitter.com/alexisdlattre/status/1578514876573491200), I said I was thinking about forking l10n_fr.

In the past, some localization modules were forked:

• l10n_ch in v7, cf https://github.com/OCA/l10n-switzerland/tree/7.0/l10n_ch
• l10n_es in v10, cf https://github.com/OCA/l10n-spain/tree/10.0/l10n_es

I had some discussion today about this at the OCA code sprint in Liège with Stéphane Bidoula and Pedro. They both recommended not to fork the module l10n_fr module because:

• they cannot warranty that, in the addons_path, l10n-france will be before odoo/addons, so there is no warranty that the forked l10n_fr will be used in Travis to get the branch back to green
• the system that builds the python packages for pypi will not understand that there are 2 modules with the same name under 2 official/OCA projects

Another idea would be to have a module l10n_fr_oca that ships an alternative account.chart.template that would be named "Plan Comptable Général by OCA (France)". This module could depend on account_tax_unece and integrate the feature of l10n_fr_account_tax_unece. The problem is that l10n_fr is installed by default when you install the account module and the country of your company is France, cf init.py in the account module https://github.com/odoo/odoo/blob/14.0/addons/account/__init__.py#L45. I wanted to propose to modify this method in OCB to load l10n_xx_oca by default and, if it doesn't exist, load l10n_xx. There is also a second problem: l10n_fr creates a few fields (ape, siret, ...) and we should not have 2 modules that create the same fields and don't depend on each other. But, if l10n_fr_oca depend on l10n_fr, then l10n_fr is loaded first, so it is the chart of account of l10n_fr which is installed on the company. The solution I've used on the working prototype on my laptop is that l10n_fr_oca doesn't depend on l10n_fr and doesn't define any field, so l10n_fr_oca is loaded BEFORE l10n_fr, so the OCA chart of account is installed on the company. l10n_fr would be installed later, for example when you install l10n_fr_siret (l10n_fr_siret depend on l10n_fr) or any other OCA module that depend on l10n_fr.

What do you think ?

[dreispt]

Can you use a low "sequence" in your OCA module to ensure it loads before the Odoo one?

[alexis-via]

Thinking about adding a module l10n_fr_oca and have it installed by default in OCB with OCA/OCB#1138

[alexis-via]

Fork done: l10n_fr_oca!