I am actually planning to create a 6 backport of OpenID and Aggregator for 7 (depending on the outcome of http://groups.drupal.org/node/21221 and http://drupal.org/node/293318). I'd use project/openid and project/ aggregator for these backports. I need to have these modules on 6 to deploy them on production sites - the only way to make sure stuff works. Working on HEAD without deploying changes in months is scary. Current Drupal infrastructure is not conducive to these kind of backports, being able to keep these alternate versions for 6 in the same repository would be great. But I would pay for this advantage with the project page (crucial for communication around alternate versions like this) and with the packaging infrastructure of contrib. So let me recap your suggestion, Aggregator DRUPAL-7--1 would be packaged with Drupal 7.x, there would be an Aggregator DRUPAL-7--2 that would contain new features more or less mirroring HEAD. How would Aggregator DRUPAL-7--2 be packaged? It would need a similar infrastructure like a Drupal contrib project, right? Alex On Apr 20, 2009, at 7:01 PM, Karoly Negyesi wrote:
Hi,
So it seems there is quite some talk about moving some of the core to contrib. This talk comes up from time but we did not have testing and now we do. And that makes a big, big difference, I tell you.
So let's suppose that aggregator gets moved into contrib. Every core tarball still contains aggregator, the latest tag from the DRUPAL-7--1 branch. But the aggregator people can churn out bugfixes as fast as they can and the tests will make sure they won't break stuff. Meanwhile, new features can get into DRUPAL-7--2. Every user can use --2 invidually, core will come with --1 still. Also, they maintain a DRUPAL-8--1 branch and for every unstable/beta/RC they make sure they have ported aggregator and tag similarly as core does (we can punt some of the unstables -- I could understand that not every module gets DBTNG'd immediately it did not happen anyways). Let's list the benefits again:
*) if a company is interested in a module it can grow a community around much easier than with core. They can both release bugfixes and features. *) core does not lose the feedback from its modules
Possible problems:
*) lose of maintenance *) additional burden on these maintainers w/ HEAD compatibility.
Also, aspiring projects can opt for core inclusion (if they accept that a branch can not break APIs and willing to tag along with core) which can be much easier this way. Let's face it, there are much higher quality contribs than the mess called comment module so why not?
There is the small problem of how can people using cvs update core now, do they need to run a cvs up for every directory? Hardly. We can create a 'mirror' which pulls together the commits. This is an easily doable (and yes I am willing to script it).
Regards
Karoly Negyesi
Alex Barth http://www.developmentseed.org/blog tel (202) 250-3633