Re: [development] module duplication in Drupal contrib
On Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:25:40 -0300, "Greg Knaddison - GVS" <Greg@GrowingVentureSolutions.com> wrote:
Hi,
"Modules that duplicate functionality available from an existing module are damaging to the Drupal project."
Please support or refute that statement and propose strategies for managing CVS applications and/or projects on Drupal.org in a way that will best help the Drupal project.
I'm using "Drupal project" in a very loose sense so you should infer that it includes lots of groups of people like new users, site builders, contributors, drupal.org admins, the security team, etc.
Thanks, Greg
Support: Time spend "reinventing the wheel" (duplicating modules) is time not spent making the wheels we have better. That results in 2-3-4 mediocre modules with one single point of failure instead of one good module with multiple possible maintainers. That makes it more likely that a user will find a module inadequate, or that it will become abandoned leaving the user high and dry. That's damaging both to Drupal-based sites and to Drupal's reputation. Solutions: I really need to get back to this issue at some point: http://drupal.org/node/168819 If someone else wants to take it over, please do. A block like this needs to be very prominent on the site (or one of the sites after the redesign). --Larry Garfield
On Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:25:36 -0500 Larry Garfield <larry@garfieldtech.com> wrote:
Support: Time spend "reinventing the wheel" (duplicating modules) is time not spent making the wheels we have better. That results in 2-3-4 mediocre modules with one single point of failure instead of one good module with multiple possible maintainers. That makes it more likely that a user will find a module inadequate, or that it will become abandoned leaving the user high and dry. That's damaging both to Drupal-based sites and to Drupal's reputation.
It makes modules much harder to find/chose.
Solutions: I really need to get back to this issue at some point:
yup... could we copy debian package tags or something similar to add meta info/keywords to module packages (.info)? Plus sometimes it is very hard to understand what the module do from what you can find in the module page. -- Ivan Sergio Borgonovo http://www.webthatworks.it
I totally agree that having a bunch of modules which do half of what people want is a negative thing. I'm guilty of it myself, call it the open source learning curve I suppose.. (i'm reformed! I swear!). That being said, I don't think there's anything wrong with a little competition, it just gets out of control when you have 5 modules which do almost identical things in equally crappy ways.
participants (3)
-
Brad Bowman -
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo -
Larry Garfield