[infrastructure] Re: [development] Drupal 4.5 unsupported

[Dries Buytaert]

*** Liza wrote:
> That's an awesome question. I'd like to hear from developers and  
> the people in the marketing team. The question is at the core of  
> what I feel Drupal is overlooking at the moment --code freezes.

*** Peter wrote:
>> Dovetailing on Fernando's questions, what can less technical 4.6  
>> users do to
>> extend the useful life of 4.6 after 4.8 has hit the scene? I'm not  
>> enough of
>> a programmer to adopt and maintain old modules--I'm more a UI and  
>> technical
>> writer type at this point. Better documentation doesn't help preserve
>> abandoned code, though, so I'm wondering what users who are non- 
>> programmer
>> can do to preserve 4.6 for the years to come.

As I mentioned before, given enough support, I'd be happy to commit  
patches against the Drupal 4.5 and Drupal 4.6 branch.

The more users that are willing to stick with Drupal 4.5 or Drupal  
4.6, the more likely it is going to be maintained.

You can answer Drupal 4.5 and Drupal 4.6 related support questions in  
the forums; that certainly helps to maintain the community around  
Drupal 4.5 and Drupal 4.6.  Getting excellent support for Drupal 4.5  
and Drupal 4.6 related problems might be a reason not to upgrade.

You can spend time in the issue tracker; test patches, help make sure  
that bug reports are easy to understand, and that bugs can be  
reproduced easily.  (You don't need to be a developer for this;  
testing != developing.)  It lowers the barrier for developers to look  
at your bug reports.

Or, if Drupal 4.5 or Drupal 4.6 is really important for you, you can  
hire a developer to look at your problem, or to backport security  
fixes.  Getting someone to backport security issues looks essential  
to me.

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