[drupal-devel] Module management

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

On Fri, 22 Apr 2005, Jeff Robbins wrote:

> On Apr 22, 2005, at 2:14 PM, Allie Micka wrote:
> > The collection of modules wouldn't necessarily be distributed with
> > core, but represent an array of non-overlapping functionality.  Pehaps
> > this is achieved through votes or a certain level of maturity.  It is
> > just starting to get to the point where the module list is getting
> > unwieldy and it isn't clear what each is doing, so there's overlap and
> > inexperience.  The tier of "approved" modules would presumably not
> > suffer this problem, so if they do include patches to core it won't be
> > as big of a concern.
>
> This starts to get off the "patch" topic in into the larger area of
> module management on drupal.org. It seems like Drupal's popularity is
> growing exponentially and so is module development. And with so many
> modules it's hard to tell what is what.

Right.

> Speaking as a person who only discovered Drupal about 5 months ago, it
> was really hard to figure out what were the *important* modules, which
> were essentially duplicates of other outdated modules, and so on.
>
> I've been thinking that it might be a good idea to enable some sort of
> comments for the module pages. Many developers post their module with
> only a line or two about what it does. Comments would allow users to
> post more information about the module, post links to other modules
> that have similar-but-different functionality, tips on how to use the
> module, etc. The comment system at php.net is essential for figuring
> out tips and tricks for PHP functions and it seems like we could have
> the same thing for modules.

I consider this to be in principle a good idea. The problem is that
people will also post support requests there and that somebody would
need to delete those and there should be a line informing people that
such requests would be deleted. As long as we cannot give project owners
the power to only delete comments on thier project nodes, this isn't
really going to work.

> Another step in this direction would be a module rating system, but
> there are potential flaws with that - such as a high rated module that
> *used* to be essential, but now is obsolete.

If  module is really obsolete, it will be removed. The problem is that
we currently offer downloads for at least the Drupal versions since 4.0
if not 3.0. We maybe should limit this to 4.4 to HEAD and remove all
projects that do not have releases for any of those versions and which
are not developed actively anymore.

I am also very fond of the idea to categorize our modules through
taxonomy. The problem is that Dries isn't sure that this would work well
with project module. Project.module relies on taxonomy for some other
stuff (themes, modules, ...) and adding another vocab might break that.
Since Dries won't let me try it on drupal.org and I don't have a
project.module install myself it would be helpfull if somebody would
step forward and do some tests.

Cheers,
	Gerhard