[development] CVS branch work best practices?

[Earl Miles]

Moshe Weitzman wrote:
>> 1) Your target audience is very very small. Comparatively, only a 
>> handfull of developers will be using HEAD, and they'll be developing 
>> with it, not using contrib modules.
>>
> 
> Why bother convincing Contrib maintainers that tracking core HEAD is a 
> bad idea? If you don't like it, don't do it.

There is a disconnect between:

We recommend you do this (Dries' position recommending A)

and

If you don't like it, don't do it.

> Some people actually do track HEAD and I am very thankful for them. In 
> particular, these people actually use the APIs that are being dreamed up 
> in HEAD. This fixes bugs and refines APIs *before* the code freeze. For 
> example, og converted to using the node arbitrator stuff during the 
> release cycle and as a result a few improvements were made before freeze.

This isn't how I feel most contrib authors are likely to operate. Contrib 
authors who are very close to core and interact regularly with the core 
developers and have a good feel for the patches that are going in can do this. 
But I think it's unrealistic to recommend that most contrib developers do this.

And there are some cases like the node_access stuff where we do need modules to 
actually utilize the API, but bear in mind the burden that puts on the module 
developer. Also, what you describe isn't *actually* option a. Option a suggests 
you have basically stopped development on the previous version of the module 
before the next version of Drupal is even available. It's *this* that I'm 
arguing against. That is a bad practice that, in the 4.7 cycle, left a lot of 
people in a limbo of seeing new features that they couldn't use.