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

[Bèr Kessels]

Op maandag 1 mei 2006 09:08, schreef Dries Buytaert:
> The sooner, the better.  
> Things that are ready to go in, go in.  Things that are not ready to  
> go in are postponed to the next version.  Depending on what went in,  
> we call the next version Drupal 4.8 or Drupal 5.0.  Simple as that.

This is oversimplified. But yes. Keeping stuff Simple is a good Drupal habit. 

Still the fact remains that there are a LOT of big things that want to get 
into 4.8. To name but a few, which I think make a fair chance:
 * views in core. Will require a lot of code and modules in core to be 
removed. Not changed, but removed!
 * output in fapi strucures, being the newt step towars more of a, MVC. 
Requires big changes in all modules. Possibly more then fAPI even. Adrian has 
been talking about this a lot.
 * CCK in core. not this next release, probably, but certainly worth 
investigating. After all the purpose of CCK was mostly to get it ready for 
core? 
 * Foo as nodes. Some work, code and plans are to make profiles as nodes 
(*cough*) and I am confident that categories.module (taxonomy as nodes) will 
prove a better alternative then taxonomy.module! I have heard a lot of talk 
about this, as well as real working code. Just this week another feeds- and 
feed-items as nodes hit contribs. 
 
Working on these four will, I fear and hope, put Drupal completely 
upside-down. 

If any of the four goes in, and has an impact close to fAPI, we already need 
*7 months* (the time it took to get fAPI stable enough for a release) in any 
case. Add another one and the time will increase exponentially. Views in 
core, together with, lets say, CCK, would stretch a release to somwhat one 
and half year, I think. Now, add a third and a fourth, and time will be 
counted in years, I fear.

So, it is simply pragmatism that makes me think we *need* separate branches.

It would be a pity if people have to wait for 
"a-freetagging-alike-feature" (or podcasting support) for 1.5 years, just 
because all the huge infrastructural changes keep the release from releasing.

I would even go so far as to predict, that if we keep Drupal so long (a year) 
from releasing in the coming cycle, people will release forks, just to be 
able to distribute and use a backported feature. People will backport a 
feature (like freetagging) and release that 'drupal' as DrupalFreeTagging or 
so. [*]

[*] freetagging is used as example, because it was a feature added early in 
the 4.7 branch, yet only reached people today. 

Bèr
-- 
| Bèr Kessels | webschuur.com | website development |
| Jabber & Google Talk: ber at jabber.webschuur.com
| http://bler.webschuur.com | http://www.webschuur.com |