[development] blocks by role in 4.7.0? RTBC?

[Chris Johnson]

Derek Wright wrote:
> On Sat, 25 Mar 2006 09:53:14 +0100  Robert Douglass wrote:
> 
>> I can't help but think that making an exception, just days away from
>> the release candidate, is a bad idea.
> 
> [cross posting from http://drupal.org/node/18018]
> 
> argh. ;)  dries himself thought this was worthy of getting in 4.7.0.
> kieran has talked about this feature as the "#1 requested usability
> feature from admins" (right?).  there have been *dozens* of forum
> posts about it.  the code is ready.  it's been reviewed and tested
> many times.  for apparently no good reason, it sat here for a month,
> unloved.  :(  i'm all for getting 4.7.0 out the door, but spending 10
> minutes now to finally commit the patch can save hours (days?) of
> needless support and admin time hacking around this problem for the
> entire lifespan of 4.7.  i'm also all for speeding up the
> devel/release cycle, but i'm sure it'll be months before 6.8.0 is out,
> and at least a year before most drupal sites are running 4.8, probably
> longer.  i think it'd be a shame to force all our users to suffer
> through another release without this crucial feature.  i too, have
> other features i'd love to see, but they aren't as universally
> requested as this one, so i'm willing to wait on those.  also, since
> this *does* alter the db schema (it adds a new table), if we don't get
> it committed before the RC, there's no hope for it before 4.8. 

I think I would advocate getting 4.7 out the door *this week* (if possible), 
and then I (as well as people like Derek and others who have small features 
they really wanted in 4.7) will strongly advocate for a very, VERY short cycle 
until 4.8 -- like releasing 4.8 in May, and pushing the BIG new features (I'm 
sure Adrian has something up his sleeve :-) ) to the next release after 4.8. 
We have a lot of pent-up development that's ready to commit except for the 4.7 
"code freeze" so 4.8 could really happen that fast -- IMHO, of course.

[I'd argue separately that the next big API change release should be called 
5.0, not 4.8 or 4.9, but that's another battle.]

..chrisxj