Dries Buytaert wrote:
Hello world,
I'm mailing to talk a bit more about the Drupal 6 release schedule. Drupal 5 had a 3 month development period, followed by a 5 month code freeze. For Drupal 6, I'd like to propose a 4 month development period, followed by a code freeze. As with Drupal 5, the code freeze will be guaranteed to be at least 2 months to give module authors time to plan and catch up. In practice, and depending on the state of Drupal core at the code freeze date, it might take more than two months to get things stable.
Sounds good?
-- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/
I am a developer who considers himself to be at ease with Drupal, but far from being an Drupal expert. Drupal is my main development platform, and probably as many of you do, I also dream Drupal sometimes :-) With regards to that - I feel that from 4.7 to 5 Drupal changed in such a extreme manner, that it will take most of the developers 4 months only to get to know Drupal 5 properly... Most of Drupal developers are not core developers, and might be intimidated by rapid, extreme changes. I'm talking about API, not, for example, the CCK integration. Drupal is already reputated to have a slow learning curve, and every time you get to the summit, the mountain becomes higher :-) I can see the need to release a newer, better CMS when possible, certainly in a very competitive surrounding, and maybe that's the right thing to do, ideally. BUT (and here comes the "but"), don't we risk being a bit too fast? The intuitive answer is "No, we found a better way to do things, so why wait?!". I see it a bit like raising a child. You can't always tell him/her "that's a better way, do like this". They need time to assimilate and absorb. It's healthier for them and their growth would be much more stable. The same might be applicable to software. And I could easily find an example from climbing too fast and running out of oxygen, or from any other fields of interest you may have, just for the sake of making things clearer. It's not about not wanting to be higher, but it's about doing things the right way. I don't know... maybe I'm just getting too old and slow... Finally, and this relates to a parallel discussion about maintaining "old" modules, we must remember that our clients (we do work for them, eventually), can not all afford upgrades so often. This might sound idiotic, but it must be taken into consideration. Smart clients, and most of them are, are studying the market well before investing in such a content platform, that is becoming more and more centric in business. If we move too fast for modules' maintainers to upgrade their modules, we'll end up with a very advanced CMS, but our sites won't survive more than a year. OK - while writing this I already received two excited mails about the date (Dries is a year behind, go to sleep... or wake up! ;-) ), and anyway, I'm reaching the midnight barrier where I'm at (remember - no posts to the list after midnight for the sake of our sanity :-) ), and I wrote too much (maybe I AM becoming too old....), So I'll just finish with a small proposition: let's try to at least make n effort and prepare the community for the changes. Periodic posts about tendencies in the development will soften the shock when D6 lands here. Good night all, Zohar