[development] Counting .info files [Was: Documenting contribs]

[Derek Wright]

On Oct 25, 2006, at 6:59 PM, Michelle Cox wrote:

> I knew that .info was meant for 5.x, but (nearly) all these project  
> pages that are currently for 4.7 modules will be for 5.x modules  
> soon. I was afraid they would undo everything I'm doing. I didn't  
> get a direct answer to my question, but the wording of related  
> posts made it sound like that's not the case.

as the person most likely to write any code that takes .info files  
and replaces project descriptions with them, i guess i should speak  
to this...

i have no intention of doing anything like this anytime soon for a  
variety of reasons:

1) the new release system is more important.

2) porting project* and friends to the 5.x API is more important.

3) .info files are still too new, and will probably be in flux for a  
few versions of core.  before i (or anyone else) invests serious  
effort to do something like this, i'd like to see the .info files a  
little more well-established and mature.

4) i think the kinds of descriptions we'd want in the .info files and  
in the project pages are totally different.  as someone pointed out,  
the .info files are specific to a given release, whereas the project  
node's description spans all releases and branches.  moreover, the  
full project page text could potentially be large, and one of the  
points of the info file was to prevent running out of memory on the / 
admin/modules page (/admin/settings/modules in 5.x, i guess). i'd  
hate to see the .info files bloat so huge that we start running into  
this problem again. ;)

5) .info files are *entirely* specific to drupal code, and  
project.module needs to be useful to other sites, too.  we probably  
will have a project_drupal_org.module in the near future to put the  
worst of our site-specific hacks into, but i'm not interested in  
making project.module significantly more specific to our usage than  
it already is.


so, i'll boldly assert that this will NOT happen during 5.x, and  
possibly not ever. ;)

cheers,
-derek (your under-slept and sometimes friendly project.module  
maintainer)


p.s. rock on michelle!  +1 to just editing directly (and leaving a  
revision).  thanks for improving drupal. ;)