While I agree with the substance of what your are saying here, I would be careful with the word "marginalize".

While I would strongly support a default filter that only includes stable releases (which is reasonable, and would be a big help for everyone, as would the oft-discussed points system, which admittedly would be hard to implement), you still want to encourage people to publish dev versions of modules, without putting a time limit on how long it takes for a stable version of that module to come out (for a whole variety of reasons discussed here).

People should not use modules which don't have stable releases, as Miles says.

But a stable, active, development community needs to encourage experimental modules also, many of them need the involvement of the community in order to flourish. And sometimes that takes time, also. So I think "marginalize" is a poor choice of words.

But definitely, non-developer users should be steered clear of experimental work which is mainly of interest to developers.

saludos,

Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar

On Feb 18, 2008 4:16 PM, Moshe Weitzman <weitzman@tejasa.com> wrote:
The Drupal Association and the Security have discussed off and on how
to improve the security of Contrib and the effectiveness of our update
mechanism. And you are right that we are considering changes to how
modules without stable releases are listed on drupal.org. We also
discussed how update module should handle them. You can bet that any
changes we make will further marginalize these modules, since they
operate outside of update module which is a very bad thing.

On Feb 18, 2008 11:56 AM, Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel@free.fr> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2008-02-18 at 08:49 -0800, Earl Miles wrote:
> > Ashraf Amayreh wrote:
> > > Sometime I think this should become a requirement rather than something
> > > optional, all current dev releases could be promoted to a first release
> > > and new dev releases banned.
> >
> > No, because during active development it is really convenient to have
> > the -dev releases available.
> >
> > I agree that it is inconvenient that sloppy module maintainers do not
> > create releases. However, this is my philosophy:
> >
> > If the maintainer of the module is sloppy enough as to not be able to
> > provide proper releases, despite the existence of a good release
> > mechanism, then I have little reason to trust that module developer's code.
> >
> > i.e, I think people simply should not use these modules.
>
> But then, these modules should be filtered out of the modules list on
> drupal.org, unless one ticks an "include unreleased modules" checkbox.
> That would help greatly in building a module set.
>
>         Xav
>
>
>