[development] Very concerned over Drupal's core development

[Dries Buytaert]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 8:02 PM, Matt Farina <matt at mattfarina.com> wrote:
> The concern I've had is more along the lines of what chx noted. Go back and
> read it. It's not the committing of patches. It's the people with expertise
> in different areas working on and reviewing patches. For all the hundreds of
> people working on core there are areas we need more people qualified to work
> on the tough stuff, more people reviewing patches, and more people crafting
> them to be core worthy. More committers doesn't help with this part of the
> process (though that may eventually become a bottleneck).

This is spot on.

It's important that we look at Drupal core development at the
macro-level -- "Drupal core is a very healthy project that is making
steady progress, but it risks going too fast and becoming too complex
for (contrib) developers".   Often, contributors, including myself,
are thinking at the micro-level -- "my patch is really important, but
it doesn't bubble to the top, and it doesn't get committed so let's
get grumpy because things are too slow".

Giving more people commit access doesn't solve the macro-problem.  It
seemingly solves the micro-level problem, but at the expense of making
the macro-level problem worse.  That is key to understand -- and
explained by webchick.

Matt is spot on because he succeeds at looking at the macro-level.

It is what I call a 'community responsibility' to help solve this
problem.  From doing a better job educating people to fighting
complexity.  The fact that we have poll module is not a source of
complexity because it can be safely ignored 98% of the time.  The fact
that we have difficult to understand subsystems and increasingly more
Drupal-isms is a problem.

-- 
Dries Buytaert :: http://buytaert.net/