[development] Very concerned over Drupal's core development

[George]

Earl Miles wrote:
> Think of the Drupal Framework as the Linux Kernel, and then the Drupal 
> distribution as Linux. The framework includes only the APIs -- node, 
> user, base object stuff. The foundation. Drupal then provides 
> applications built upon that foundation. It starts with just one: 
> Something resembling Drupal as we know it today. We split core, and we 
> devote effort to the most important projects. This might allow us to 
> better focus efforts, anyway. One of the issues I see is that core 
> itself is too big. Neither of the two committers really understand 
> everything they've been committing, lately. (If you doubt me...field 
> API =)
I think Drupal growing in size is natural. Drupal doesn't have to fit 
onto a floppy disk. Code bloat, and overall code size are two different 
things.

I'm really surprised and scared at how quickly Drupal is progressing. At 
this rate, contrib will never be able to keep up all the features in 
core, with only handfuls of people really understanding it, and so it 
will be a complete waste of time coding the features in the first place. 
Each radical change between major core versions means more time 
investment for contrib developers to upgrade their modules.

So, instead of trying to clump lots of really great cool features into 
the next major release and blowing everyone away, how about picking a 
few major features, and make them the best they can be, and then adding 
other new features at a later date? This would give contrib developers 
time to develop for them, and the docs team time to document.