[development] Drupal Modules and Linux Distros

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

Seemant Kulleen wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 12:29 +0200, Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
> 
>> Our relationship with people packaging Drupal has also been rather 
>> problematic. ;p
> 
> I hope not with Gentoo...
> 
>> Also, before you consider doing any package you should check if your 
>> distribution's release policy matches Drupal's. As a result of such a 
>> check not being done, Debian ships now with a Drupal 4.5 package which 
>> isn't maintained by us anymore.
> 
> Not sure what you mean here -- Gentoo tends to be a moving target, so if
> 4.6 gets deemed as the new upstream stable, Gentoo devs tend to follow
> up on that in the distro itself (in most cases, anyway).

Debian has apparently a policy to never add new features to a stable 
Debian release, only bug fixes. But since Debian's release cycle is much 
longer than Drupal's this leads to problems. Drupal's stable release is 
4.7 and 4.5 was released about two years ago.

So if Gentoo accepts new features into its new releases, then this won't 
be a problem.

> 
>> This is not a thing developers themselves can do anything about. The 
>> problem is with our way of packaging things. Luckily, this should change 
>> soon and from there on tarballs once created should be stable.
> 
> Being completely new to the world of drupal, I'm not sure I understand
> the packaging method or the changes in store.  Can you point me to a doc
> where I may learn more?

http://drupal.org/node/77562
http://drupal.org/node/90436

>  Also, when will these changes happen?

Soon(tm)

Actually, some have already happened. The rest might happen this or next 
week.

Oh, and a final word from me: Please don't simply package modules 
*because* *you* *can*. Contrib is not reviewed in any way. Modules may 
have serious security holes. Modules may even be abandoned. So first 
evaluate the modules you want to package.

Cheers,
	Gerhard, wearing his contrib-CVS admin hat