[development] Very concerned over Drupal's core development

[Nathaniel Catchpole]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 10:19 PM, Dries Buytaert wrote:
> Something else which is worth to discuss.
>
> In private conversations, various people have expressed concerns that
> our release cycles are too long, and that, as a result, they are not
> interested in working on core.  If they have a problem, and they fix
> it in core, they have to wait 1-2 years before they can actual use
> their own improvement in a production environment.  In a lot of cases,
> people don't bother with it because they can't wait that long.
>
>
> In other words, moving to shorter release cycles could help.  Not only
> does it increase the incentive for people to work on core, it could
> also provide additional focus.

With testing, dbtng  and Field API I think it would have been
impossible to get them all in during the six month release cycle, and
hard to do any of them properly in that time either (unless they were
committed the first week) - actually writing tests and converting
modules has taken a long time, and that's been a good thing as all
three APIs are maturing during the process.

However, having made all those big changes in one release, it'd be
really interesting to consider a shorter cycle for Drupal 8. Some
things which are looking less likely for Drupal 7 (views in core, a
non-crappy comment and forum module) would be great to have in a
shorter timespan than another two year release cycle.

Nat





>
> In fact, a lot of big projects, like the Linux kernel, Gnome, KDE,
> Ubuntu, Fedora and Wordpress all switched to 6 month release cycles.
> Mark Shuttleworth posted some good insights about that in a recent
> blog post: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/288.  I'm not
> suggesting that we should switch to 6 month release cycles, I'm merely
> bringing it up to get feedback on the idea.
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 11:03 PM, Dries Buytaert
> <dries.buytaert at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I think catch hits a lot of good points about how our reward and trust
>> system could be improved.  I'm all for better profile pages, giving
>> credit where credit is due, and providing better visibility into who
>> is working on what.  It might be useful to provide a "Reviewer rating"
>> or "Reviewer score" -- something which could be an incentive for more
>> people to review patches.  Maybe this can be accomplished through some
>> project module extensions?  I'm not sure what the best approach would
>> be, but it is worthy of a discussion.
>
> --
> Dries Buytaert :: http://buytaert.net/
>