Let me sidetrack this thread to give some insight into why some people feel strong about the book patch. Dries Buytaert wrote:
Maybe the code freeze frenzy blinds you too? Consider to take a fresh perspective on why the actions module went in and why the book module improvements haven't yet. I'll share you my perspective ...
I agree with parts of the book patch, and I disagree with other parts of the book patch. Regardless my disagreements, I don't think the book patch is super-high priority. Frankly, there is no harm done when the book improvements don't make it into Drupal 6.
"Unfortunately" how the book module works, (or not works for that matter) has a high impact on the community. The Drupal Handbooks, as the main source of information for beginners and aspiring developers alike is organized with this module. Just as project module has a high impact on development in the community, book module has a high impact on documentation. Project module being in the contributions repository has a good chance of being developed with a higher pace then book module, which is tied to the Drupal release cycle. By reading through the book module patch comments, it seems obvious, that people commenting/working on the book module improvements did not take Dries' concerns seriously about where the module is going to (although he repeated them many times), and did not (visibly) investigate other paths to take. Now that project module is maturing (even more so with the current Google Summer of Code projects), bigger problems come from lack of two technical solutions in the community: content and user management. These include organization of the handbooks and often spam (content, user) prevention and deletion. People take a lot of time removing spam and blocking spammy users and as the book module patch comments show, they think the UI of the current book module could be made much better for the handbooks. Unfortunately this only describes why the book module patch could be important, but does not help solving the UI problems Dries has with it. These are explained better in the issue though. Issue: http://drupal.org/node/146425 Gabor