[development] Unified image/video management module

[Vernon Mauery]

Hi, as the author of Acidfree, I have gotten lots of praise for creating an 
image/video system that is easy for people to use.  Granted at first it was 
not perfect, but it has made great advances and gained quite a following in 
the year.  But I have also gotten a lot of flak from people saying that it 
wasn't done in the true spirit of Drupal.  The praise came from users, the 
flak came from developers.

Now that I have worked with the Drupal community for a year, I have realized 
that my approach was *not* fully in spirit with Drupal.  Really, I probably 
should have stuck my head in a cold bucket and listened to Gerhard, Boris, 
and Dries and tried to work with other module authors.  Acidfree is an 
awesome application -- it is simple to use (very usable UI), easy to theme, 
and has an appropriate feature set.  But it still bugs me that I didn't quite 
do it right. So here is my first stab at repentance.

But I have a question.  I think I can do now what I should have done a year 
ago (but was unable to because of pride and lacking APIs).  I have made a 
list of things that Acidfree does for me and have found that I can accomplish 
nearly all of the things I want to with new advances in APIs and a study of 
other modules that are available.  I think by using Image, Video, Taxonomy, 
Views, and use of the form API, I could turn Acidfree into a management 
module and let the other node module take care of themselves.  I guess the 
question is: should make a new module or just change Acidfree (by providing 
an upgrade path)?  If I do this, I don't really want to have to manage 
Acidfree and this new module, plus, I really think the name is great.  My 
opinion is that I should release a 4.8 version of Acidfree that defines 0 
node types and simply works with the appropriate node types to offer a 
unified management interface.  But I worry about all the users I have 
attracted.  Maybe I should target 4.9 (or whatever 2 releases from now is) 
and say that Acidfree will be obsolete in that release and create a new 
module called something else.  But I don't really want to pollute the module 
space.

I remember a while back that the fact that Drupal does not really have a 
unified way of dealing with multimedia was a big deal.  Are people still 
interested in this?  Or should I just crawl back in my cave and continue 
plugging away at Acidfree?

--Vernon