Notwithstanding the fact that modules shed from core tend to die, I think some of the modules you mention could indeed be made contrib, because their are "application"-type (like aggregator, forum, or poll), whereas one (taxonomy) is what really defines Drupal to many people outside the coder group, and others (search, statistics, ....profile(!) ) are part of anyone's basic expectations in a CMS. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Douglass" <rob@robshouse.net> To: <development@drupal.org> Sent: Monday, April 20, 2009 6:03 PM Subject: Re: [development] Very concerned over Drupal's core development [...] The other solution which chx and I have discussed, and which is a long time goal of mine, would be to reduce the size of core. We carry around a lot of modules that don't absolutely need to be part of core: - aggregator - blog - blogapi - forum - help - poll - profile - search - statistics - taxonomy - tracker I believe that all of these modules could have brilliant lives outside of core. A slimmer core means more focused development for the core team. It would also make us focus our attention on the APIs that support these very important modules. For example, the search API is in great need of being decoupled from the node module. If our goal were to remove search from core we'd need to really make sure the API were in place for letting core be searched. [...]