To be honest, I think this is an absolutely terrible idea. It's
just not scalable. We've got thousands of contributed modules and themes, which makes for millions of lines of code. To ask that we can have a core team of developers managing contrib patches,
Quite frankly that's not what i'm proposing, out of the reasons you just stated. BTW although according to wget -qO - http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/|html2text<http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/%7Chtml2text>-width 130 -nobs|'grep' "\-6.x\-"|sed 's/\[\[ \]\]//;s/-6.*//'|sort -u|wc -l there currently are 2227 D6 contrib projects (compared to 2827 for D5) - do you really think all of those provide a useful benefit to the community? how many of those are deprecated, unmaintained or plain useless? Even then we can prevent that from happening on D7 *without* destroying what's already there. D6 will live on for perhaps up to a decade anyways... There are still D4 sites out there!
Yes, your observation is correct, but ... so what? We've always had stuff that falls off the face of earth. So what? The caravan continues on ... The very first module I contributed (feedback) illustrates a point: It was started in 2002 by someone called "barry". I had it working I took it over in 2004 with totally new code for Drupal 4.5. Then "fago" overhauled it a lot in 2006. Over time, the contact module in core came along, and I stopped using feedback. Then in 2008 "sun" took it over and repurposed it with new code. The "too many modules in contrib syndrome" can be taken as confusing, excessive, ...etc. but can also be taken as a sign of a healthy and vibrant community. So what if we have a few extra gigabytes of code? So what if they become unmaintained? If we raise the barrier or block new entries we will be shutting ourselves off from being the platform for the new chx or the new merlinofchaos. It does not matter ... if it is the wild wild west, then let it be. It is a small price to pay for innovation and the power of the masses. -- Khalid M. Baheyeldin 2bits.com, Inc. http://2bits.com Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting. Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. -- Edsger W.Dijkstra Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. -- Leonardo da Vinci