Chris Johnson wrote:
I only said a year sabbatical to make it clear that nothing was going to happen soon enough. I am not really talking about abandoned modules, just those that might not get updated "soon enough" where "soon enough" is open for interpretation.
A module whose maintainer is gone for a year is, IMO, effectively abandoned. It might continue working, but it's abandoned. And if a large percentage of Drupal users depend on it, that is a problem completely separate from any version upgrade woes.
I can think of maybe a handful of modules that are THAT complex. Views? Yes. Project? Yes. eCommerce and its suite of related modules? Absolutely. Those are all important, but declaring that we will never ship Drupal if those modules aren't released at the same time is silly. I didn't suggest not shipping Drupal if those modules are not released at the same time. That's a straw horse. All I said is that the current course of action is not addressing the problem. OK, that suggestion was an integral part of the previous 'Golden Repository' suggestions from past discussions, so I thought it was what you were talking about. I just think that setting up a special qualification for a specific set of popular modules is going to help the situation any. If something is that critical and popular, it doesn't take putting a gold star on the node to know that it is important, you know? And if telling people, "Hey, this is really important!" is the only thing that the designation accomplishes, we're back in square one.
During the 4.7 freeze/beta/RC cycle, Dries sent out a list of critical modules that were 'must haves' for the 4.7 release, and encouraged developers to focus on them. Barring some sort of official 'we won't ship without X ready' policy, I don't see what more would be accomplished by naming that list. I'm not saying that the problem of critical and complex modules lagging behind the Core development cycle doesn't exist. Just that maintaining a special list isn't going to help the problem. --Jeff