[development] Some of core to contrib?

[Karoly Negyesi]

Hi,

So it seems there is quite some talk about moving some of the core to
contrib. This talk comes up from time but we did not have testing and
now we do. And that makes a big, big difference, I tell you.

So let's suppose that aggregator gets moved into contrib. Every core
tarball still contains aggregator, the latest tag from the DRUPAL-7--1
branch. But the aggregator people can churn out bugfixes as fast as
they can and the tests will make sure they won't break stuff.
Meanwhile, new features can get into DRUPAL-7--2. Every user can use
--2 invidually, core will come with --1 still. Also, they maintain a
DRUPAL-8--1 branch and for every unstable/beta/RC they make sure they
have ported aggregator and tag similarly as core does (we can punt
some of the unstables -- I could understand that not every module gets
DBTNG'd immediately it did not happen anyways). Let's list the
benefits again:

*) if a company is interested in a module it can grow a community
around much easier than with core. They can both release bugfixes and
features.
*) core does not lose the feedback from its modules

Possible problems:

*) lose of maintenance
*) additional burden on these maintainers w/ HEAD compatibility.

Also, aspiring projects can opt for core inclusion (if they accept
that a branch can not break APIs and willing to tag along with core)
which can be much easier this way. Let's face it, there are much
higher quality contribs than the mess called comment module so why
not?

There is the small problem of how can people using cvs update core
now, do they need to run a cvs up for every directory? Hardly. We can
create a 'mirror' which pulls together the commits. This is an easily
doable (and yes I am willing to script it).

Regards

Karoly Negyesi