[drupal-devel] Improvements abandoned?

[Richard Archer]

Steve raises an issue that has really been bugging me this week.

There are currently 260 or so patches in the Drupal issue tracker.
Lots of these are worthy patches... like the two Steve mentioned.
But so many of them have little or no chance of being reviewed and
applied.

There must be dozens of people beavering away making improvements
to Drupal and submitting patches only to have them get lost in this
ocean of issues. Such a waste of resources.

Something needs to be done to address this issue.

I have looked through the issues tracker reading the comments and
following the progress over time of quite a few issues. It's actually
quite sad to see a patch get written, reviewed, finalised and then
not committed only to see the issue revived 6 months later, the patch
gets updated, reviewed, approved and not committed. 6 months later
the issue gets revived by someone else bitten by the same bug.

What can we do about it?

I would like to see ten or so issues at a time nominated as "hot"
issues which are targetted, resolved and committed. I think that by
focusing on just a few issues at once that these ones will get
completed and all Drupal users will benefit from these incremental
improvements.

These need not be big patches or implementations of extensive new
features. Small patches like Steve's help text improvements are just
as worthy of inclusion as a new forms API - and a whole lot simpler :)

There just needs to be some mechanism to focus resources on a small
subset of patches so that they get reviewed, approved and committed.

 ...Richard.