Am Montag, den 20.04.2009, 18:09 +0200 schrieb Eric Schaefer:
Some word from the contrib side of drupal:
Why am I not participating in reviews of core patches? Naked fear. How could I possibly understand whats going on in core? Although I am using and developing for drupal since version 3.somthing (??) I still have problems with the inner workings of drupal. One reason for this is the fact that core is a moving target. All kinds of APIs change between major releases.
Joe Contrib Developer (thats me) does not understand why.
the answers to the question 'Why ..' are often design decisions and these are maybe documented, e.g. in issues, mailinglist, IRC, groups.drupal.org - but often in a form nobody can tell from that documentation what the decision is.
I am sure those changes are important, but I don't understand them. I just fought a furious fight with the fapi last weekend. Something that was working fine 5.x is behaving strangely in 6.x. If I am not understanding the USE of those APIs how can I judge patches to the code behind them? Solution: Dunno. Maybe extensive documentation? Not just docs for the APIs, but docs about the functionality and docs about design decisions. Such docs would also aid ports of modules to new core releases since devs would loose fear. ..
The question behind is: how are design decisions made _and_ coordinated? my suggestion form e.g. Nov. 2008 original: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2008-November/031354.html " .. If the group of persons working on a module keeps a logbook about their decisions, then everybody is able to follow the decisions regarding a module. A short description of this method of dynamic selfgovernance can be found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy or as free pdf http://www.governancealive.com/Links/The_Creative_Forces_of_Self_Organizatio... A longer description is in Buck, John and Sharon Villines (2007). We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy, A Guide to Sociocraty " So what do you think now of a _log_ for requirements and design decisions for core, APIs and modules?
One more thought about the docs: Maybe everything is I would need to loose fear is documented. But where? I always get lost in the drupal documentation...
My 0.02€, Eric