Quoting Karoly Negyesi <karoly@negyesi.net>:
Hi,
I know there are many patches are written, reviewed and committed still. But, without intending to critique of anyone in particular, I see a very dangerous cycle:
As Drupal 5 and 6 are very good, rock solid releases, people are satisfied and very busy there, much less is the need, the drive and the availability for core development. This means less patches are written. Also core got bigger. Very, very few people touch actions/triggers, fields, filter system, openid or for that matter, menu just to name a few. Once a patch is written , it needs a review. However, the testing bot, curiously, made patch reviews even harder -- no longer can a novice just install a patch, click around and report back "works" ( the testing bot, of course added a lot of quality to Drupal, I am not saying, down with the bot). This has very severe consequences: we always had too few reviewers and now the entry barrier is even harder as you need to do meaningful code reviews all the time. Low reviewer activity means patches do not get 'bumped' and they linger. Lingering is exacerbated by the loss of Steven and that the single guy who can call the big decisions now has a kid (soon two) and two companies to run. Of course, this leads to frustration on behalf of the patch writers and even less patches get written or reviewed and people draw back into their own little contrib empire where they call the shots...
While I review a few drupal core patches once in a while, there are still many prime modules needing a stable port to D6; xmlsitemap for example. I'm putting most of my time into trying to get things like this module working so I can port my sites to D6. Otherwise D7 is just a waste of time since upgrading to it requires upgrading to D6 first. -- Earnie -- http://r-feed.com/ -- http://for-my-kids.com/ -- http://www.4offer.biz/ -- http://give-me-an-offer.com/