[development] Module backwards compatibility

[Robert Douglass]

To each his own. I can hardly wait to upgrade my modules for D6 because 
it is simply a better platform. I love D5 but the longer you live with 
it the more warts you find, and each upgrade to a new Drupal version 
lets me streamline and extend. Plus, for any important module, I 
wouldn't want to be running on a compatibility layer for performance 
reasons. I imagine it would also be hard to do without introducing weird 
bugs. Just my 2 cents.

Robert

jordan at theoverclocked.com wrote:
> Improvements to Drupal's core is great, but trying to get developers 
> to update their module for the latest Drupal release gets old fast. 
> What I am proposing is an added compatibility layer for Drupal, so all 
> the module written for previous versions will still work without 
> modification.
>  
> We will start at Drupal 7, all modules for Drupal 6.x will be 
> compatible out of the box.
>  
> To accomplish this feat there is a few things involved. Instead of 
> removing functions from the core we should leave them in there but 
> modify them to work with the current Drupal core. So if a module used 
> that function it would still be there and work for it, but the 
> downfall would be new features and possibly performance.
>
> With module backwards compatibility, it would allow users to upgrade 
> to the latest Drupal core as soon as it is released rather then 
> waiting for module developers to upgrade their modules. Sometimes 
> modules never get upgraded and it is a real shame IMO to see all that 
> work goto waste.
>
> -Jordan