[development] book patch impact (was: taking a break)

[Gabor Hojtsy]

Let me sidetrack this thread to give some insight into why some people 
feel strong about the book patch.

Dries Buytaert wrote:
> Maybe the code freeze frenzy blinds you too?  Consider to take a fresh 
> perspective on why the actions module went in and why the book module 
> improvements haven't yet.  I'll share you my perspective ...
> 
> I agree with parts of the book patch, and I disagree with other parts of 
> the book patch.  Regardless my disagreements, I don't think the book 
> patch is super-high priority.  Frankly, there is no harm done when the 
> book improvements don't make it into Drupal 6.

"Unfortunately" how the book module works, (or not works for that 
matter) has a high impact on the community. The Drupal Handbooks, as the 
main source of information for beginners and aspiring developers alike 
is organized with this module.

Just as project module has a high impact on development in the 
community, book module has a high impact on documentation. Project 
module being in the contributions repository has a good chance of being 
developed with a higher pace then book module, which is tied to the 
Drupal release cycle.

By reading through the book module patch comments, it seems obvious, 
that people commenting/working on the book module improvements did not 
take Dries' concerns seriously about where the module is going to 
(although he repeated them many times), and did not (visibly) 
investigate other paths to take.

Now that project module is maturing (even more so with the current 
Google Summer of Code projects), bigger problems come from lack of two 
technical solutions in the community: content and user management. These 
include organization of the handbooks and often spam (content, user) 
prevention and deletion. People take a lot of time removing spam and 
blocking spammy users and as the book module patch comments show, they 
think the UI of the current book module could be made much better for 
the handbooks.

Unfortunately this only describes why the book module patch could be 
important, but does not help solving the UI problems Dries has with it. 
These are explained better in the issue though.

   Issue: http://drupal.org/node/146425

Gabor