[development] LinksDB vs. Links

[Syscrusher]

On Friday 28 July 2006 14:22, Boris Mann wrote:
> Would neglected be a better word? 1 & 2 as you mention above are  
> indicators to me that not enough attention is being paid to the  
> bundle (I'm not trying to diss links, just trying to find out more  
> about future direction / viability).

{hanging my head in shame}

Okay, here's what has happened with Links...

At the time I started work on the module, last summer, I was an IT consultant
with a fair amount of idle time on my hands due to the sluggish economy. Just
about the time the development got well along, my employer landed a major
project that fell right into my lap. It's a series of large upgrades to a Java
system totalling well in excess of 100K lines of code -- not trivial, and has
provided me with all the billable hours I could work for the past eight months.
At about that same time, I took over as the Chief Technical Officer of a large
(30K members) nonprofit organization.

I hadn't planned for all of this to happen at once, but the result was that
for about two months this spring I was averaging 60+ hour work weeks *plus*
10-15 hours per week of volunteer time as the nonprofit's CTO. Something had
to give, and it was either Drupal or my marriage or my health -- and Drupal
lost.

On top of everything else, I maintain approximately ten Drupal sites as a
volunteer for other nonprofits such as the public library where my wife works.
When those recent security vulnerabilities came out, I had to rush to upgrade
a whole lot of sites that I hadn't really the time to do at that moment. Such
is life.

That being said, I know that I'm *badly* behind schedule on releasing this
bundle, and I apologize to the Drupal community for that. I don't know what else
to say except that I'm sorry. I haven't lost interest in Links, though, and
in fact have started using it on my own sites in production to gain further
confidence in its reliability before releasing. I think we're at a point where
we can do that now.

As Jeff Eaton has indicated, I recently have gotten back into working on Links.
I had a long talk with my employer a few weeks ago about those killer hours,
and things have eased up quite a bit since then. There have been several contrib
patches to Links recently that fixed nagging bugs I didn't have time to address.

I like the idea of stripping the admin function out into a separate module --
it's a big chunk of code that (1) is not absolutely required and (2) could be
contributed by someone else. I'll do that, and I'll go ahead then and tag the
package for 4.7 as soon as this is done. That was a good suggestion, and I'm
wise enough to know good advice when it whacks me on the nose. :-)

Kind regards,

Scott (Syscrusher)

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Syscrusher (Scott Courtney)          Drupal page:   http://drupal.org/user/9184
syscrusher at 4th dot com            Home page:     http://4th.com/