On Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:45:14 +0100 Marcel Partap <mpartap@gmx.net> wrote:
I could even imagine that the content of this queue can be very interesting for all Drupalers Well that's the point. Have all Drupalers maintain the modules, not just a specific maintainer. Just like core, but supported by better tools..
That's not going to happen. Wine and the kernel are far different projects. There are already few reviewers for core. Don't expect to have reviewers for contrib. It is clearer how core gains from public review. It's not that clear how a maintainer may gain from code review. I'm not talking about quality of code... I'm talking about the interest of the maintainers. Core and contrib are quite different in terms of speed of development, purposes, design, coders sub-communities... People may use drupal infrastructure just if: - They're looking for public review - They're looking for co-maintainers - They're looking for exposure - They just feel "generous" and they think someone else may make good use of their code without bothering them Release early, release often refers to your users... not to everyone. If I can't release early and often for *my users* because someone else is not going to review my patch, I'm going to move my stuff elsewhere. If someone is pushing my module in a direction that doesn't fit *my users* I'm going to resist to the change. Very frequently the maintainer of a module is the one that keeps contributing the module most. You're starting from the unproved assumption that for every maintainer code review and exposure are a larger benefit than keep on being the steering committee of its own project and that drupal benefit more from a supposed increase of code quality and reduction in duplication than having a prolific competitive community of contributors. Otherwise you're heading to balkanization of contrib repositories. While I agree that natural selection may be suboptimal and rationally planning and channelling efforts may achieve better results in a shorter time[1]... natural selection is self testing and it already happens with no extra effort. Other theories have to be proved and require efforts to be put in practice. Now... if you've something better to substitute to natural selection and you can prove it is better, that's just the starting point as Laura Scott pointed out at the end of her post. If no one feels your hypothesis is worth a test, provide your own test. Then maybe you'll reach the point where "d(em)ocracy" and evolution sucks and you may start complaining ;) Otherwise there is no reason to accept "intelligent design" as a real competitor. [1] let's turn this into a flamewar about XP vs. waterfall vs. academia vs. corporate vs. opensource vs. emacs as well ;) -- Ivan Sergio Borgonovo http://www.webthatworks.it