[development] Encouraging Collaboration

[Dries Buytaert]

> I had brought up before that we might consider designated  
> maintainers for core modules -- see http://drupal.org/node/34439 --  
> there are still the majority that are theoretically "maintained" by  
> Dries. Dries, do you want to speak up and say which ones you  
> *actually* want to maintain, which might be in need of an official  
> maintainer, etc.?

Having 'official maintainers' matters for me: in the best case  
scenario people will bug the maintainer and not me.  Other than being  
the official point of contact, very little changes.

People become the official maintainer of a core module after they  
have been given the module some 'love', where 'love' implies that a  
steady stream of their patches made it into core.  For example, I  
recently invited Cvgbe (Piotr Krukowiecki) to become the official  
PostgreSQL maintainer after he contributed a dozen PostgreSQL patches.

Being the 'official maintainer' doesn't really matter for you (you,  
being a developer).  What matters for you are your patches that make  
it into core.  The more good patches, the higher you are on my list,  
the more weight you get, and the more trust you gain.  Furthermore,  
for almost all  of the core contributors, I know exactly what they  
are good at, so the weighting actually differs from topic to topic.   
For example, I may blindly trust Cvgbe's PostgreSQL contributions but  
I'll be a lot more conservative when he proposes a big forms API change.

Don't ask me to write down the list, because not only is it per  
topic, it is also ever changing.  For example, recently Richard  
Archer has done a number of great menu module patches that have been  
known to be hard, he demonstrated persistence, and he clearly  
communicated a vision; as a result, he gained quite a bit of trust  
with regard to the menu module.

--
Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/