On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 6:06 AM, Victor Kane <victorkane@gmail.com> wrote:

The solution probably exists in terms of extracting all objectively
structural information architecture decisions (panels, menus, blocks)
into text-based version-controllable definitions, together with
configuration elements: currently "serializable" via the Installation
Profile Generators: http://drupal.org/node/180078.

I think a beginning would be to ensure that for Drupal 7 there existed
an export/import facility for node types; and that CCK, Views, Panels
and what-have-you work on improving their individual import/export.

Alex Barth recently contact me about exactly this, having come to the exact same conclusion. He has opened an issue in deploy's issue queue:

http://drupal.org/node/291921

He himself wrote a module quite similar to Deploy called Ports which is pretty interesting and abstracts import/export a bit beyond what I did. Maybe he can chime in here about what he's done because I've only taken really a cursory glance at it.

He also pointed out to me that there are many admin/config level problems that are currently being worked on individually which could probably help from some communication. For instance, having well-defined import/export functionality for all "things" in Drupal would help not only deployment but install profiles, and probably a bunch of other admin/config-related issues. I'd love to see everyone discussing their problems in a more public setting, not here but perhaps in the Change Management group on g.d.o., so we can pool resources on problems when it makes sense. For all that people seem to be struggling with these issues, that group is oddly dead.

For more food for thought, there is a ton of interesting discussion in the comments on my initial blog post about Deploy:

http://heyrocker.com/drupal/content/deployment-and-change-management-framework