[development] enterprise needs

[Dries Buytaert]

On 25 Feb 2006, at 02:08, Benson Wong wrote:
> I think I have a much clearer understanding of Drupal's nature and
> developer side now. A lot of the feedback was constructive and if
> anything, has helped me make the big decision of whether choosing
> Drupal, or continuing to use it as our corporate CMS is the right
> decision.
>
> Before developing with Drupal, I didn't care much about the
> development processes behind the scenes. I just downloaded it,
> installed it and used it. Now that I've invested a lot of time into
> writing drupal code, and had at some exposure to the developer culture
> behind it, I actually have opinion about some things.

Drupal's development process resembles that of most Open Source  
projects.  I don't think the development process is broken -- what's  
not to say it can't be improved.

Where we often differ is in our culture of backward compatibility.    
 From day one, I decided not to care about backward compatibility and  
it has been one of our core values ever since.  (However, we only  
break your code, not your data.)  Either you like that, or you  
don't.  The problem is exactly that.  It's very much a matter of  
opinion as there are both advantages and disadvantages to either  
philosophy.  For example, if we were to support backward  
compatibility, we'd be in the exact opposite situation.  People would  
be vocal about the fact that we drag 100k of deprecated code around,  
that it adds a burden that slows down the release cycle or  
innovation, that their sites could be much, much faster if only we  
got rid of the legacy code, etc.

The real question is: why is upgrading _that_ important?

The Drupal 4.6 release has been out there for almost one year now,  
and is likely going to be maintained for at least another one or two  
years.  And depending on the needs, much longer than that.  (In the  
Linux kernel world, the 2.0 release series are still being maintained  
despite the fact that the original 2.0.0 kernel was released in  
1996!)  If you want a stable branch, you can use a stable branch.

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