5.0 and or 4.8 (was Re: [development] Drupal x.x.0 freeze date)

[Jenny Hsueh]

Dries Buytaert wrote:

> I'm very sceptic about roadmaps and long-term planning in the context  
> of Drupal development.  A roadmap is vaporware and creates pressure.

I respectfully disagree on this, commenting from an end user 
perspective.  A roadmap is not about time boxing what is going to be 
developed when, but a shared common vision of the community how to get 
from point A to point B -- i.e.  to understand the target and to 
understand the inter-dependencies.  I feel this is essential for  
volunteer based project, although it is true that what is being coded is 
what gets delivered but without a roadmap how would you get feedback 
from end users on what is important ?  From what  I can gather on this 
mailing list discussions, which I only joined about a month ago, it 
looks like there are some very important and nifty features in drupal 
have not had adequate resource to work on . The question is how many 
people other than the current development community aware of this?  A 
roadmap can be a very effective marketing tool to share your vision with 
a larger community,  it does not need to be time boxed.

Cheers,
jenny