[development] Gerhard, Kjartan, Steven... please explain better

[Robert Douglass]

In the sandbox discussion, an interesting pattern has appeared. 
Virtually every developer who is involved with Drupal.org infrastructure 
at a personal level (those named in the title) want to bring order to 
the sandboxes and crowbar the "not projects" that live there into the 
new release system. Everybody else is against this. Worse, we don't seem 
to be moving towards agreement.

Usually in a case like this, one side of the story isn't fully 
understood. I have to admit that I still don't understand what is so bad 
about the sandboxes that makes the people involved with infrastructure 
hate them. I use my sandbox only infrequently but am very glad it is 
there. The answer can't be "the code there is lousy" because that 
applies to at least 200 of the projects in contrib as well (a number 
which will rise with the new proposed changes). So what is it that makes 
the sandboxes a thorn in the side of the people who actually have to 
maintain the infrastructure? The work that goes into Drupal.org 
infrastructure is chronically under-appreciated, and if the sandboxes 
are a special burden that I (we) haven't recognized, it would help the 
conversation to find that out.

cheers,

Robert