[development] Very concerned over Drupal's core development

[Earl Miles]

Angela Byron wrote:
> 
> On 20-Apr-09, at 2:04 PM, Earl Miles wrote:
> 
>> Angela Byron wrote:
>>> We have this kind of decentralized development model, where one or 
>>> two people are solely responsible for code with basically zero peer 
>>> review. It's called contrib. And it's notoriously filled with 
>>> sub-standard, shoddily documented code that needs to be closely 
>>> inspected by individual site maintainers before being deployed on any 
>>> serious production sites.
>>
>> I stop following your argument here. The only way this argument holds 
>> up is that if *all* of contrib is substandard crap. It is not. There 
>> is a level of contrib that is above that, and there is a reason those 
>> particular pieces of contrib are above that. Chew on that.
> 
> And this level contrib is the kind that has enough users so that peer 
> reviews occur naturally, or at the very least peer QA after the fact. As 
> we've noted, peer review and peer QA is *not* happening with these core 
> subsystems, which makes it a lot closer to the "darker, scarier" 
> contrib. So I'm not sure what there is to chew on. :)

Perhaps you attribute more peer review and QA to some of these modules 
than is truly there. I don't think there is very much. There is peer 
review pretty much after the fact; that's the review that said "it's ok 
to use this module."

But the responsibility of the committer is what made that happen in the 
first place. I personally believe that anyone who is given the right to 
commit directly to Drupal core is going to think several times longer 
before committing something than he or she would to contrib. Obviously 
this varies based on personality, but the suggestion that adding more 
committers to core will turn core into contrib does not work for me.