[development] Very concerned over Drupal's core development

[Eric Schaefer]

Some word from the contrib side of drupal:

Why am I not participating in reviews of core patches? Naked fear. How
could I possibly understand whats going on in core? Although I am
using and developing for drupal since version 3.somthing (??) I still
have problems with the inner workings of drupal. One reason for this
is the fact that core is a moving target. All kinds of APIs change
between major releases. Joe Contrib Developer (thats me) does not
understand why. I am sure those changes are important, but I don't
understand them. I just fought a furious fight with the fapi last
weekend. Something that was working fine 5.x is behaving strangely in
6.x. If I am not understanding the USE of those APIs how can I judge
patches to the code behind them? Solution: Dunno. Maybe extensive
documentation? Not just docs for the APIs, but docs about the
functionality and docs about design decisions. Such docs would also
aid ports of modules to new core releases since devs would loose fear.
I am currently maintaining scheduler and I am still struggling with
the difference between D5 and D6. I dare not even think about a port
to D7.

One more thought about the docs: Maybe everything is I would need to
loose fear is documented. But where? I always get lost in the drupal
documentation...

My 0.02€,
Eric