[development] The future of the project module(s)

[Chad Phillips -- Apartment Lines]

After conversations with Derek, Dries, and Killes, I'd like to  
formally announce my new role as the official co-maintainer of  
project module, and related modules (cvslog, project_issue, etc.).   
Derek and I will be working together to provide support and direction  
for this very important suite -- as co-maintainers, we'll share final  
say on how things work in the project world, subject to the needs of  
drupal.org.

This is extremely good news, as Derek has labored too long alone with  
a workload that outdistances what a single great coder can do.  ;)

I'll be coming on for day-to-day duties starting August 1st, which  
luckily will be in plenty of time for the 6.x conversion.  At that  
time we'll also begin prioritizing and knocking out items on the  
currently very large to do list.

Finally, listed below is a brief summary of our mutually agreed big- 
picture priorities for project*:

1) Improve how it supports the d.o's development process  
(functionality, bug fixes, usability, etc).

2) Continue to make it general enough to be used at other sites.   
We're finally turning the corner with this (e.g. with http:// 
jquery.com/plugins now a project*-based site, and certainly others).   
This step probably includes deploying a drupalorg.module soon, for  
truly d.o-specific code that should be moved out of project* completely.

3) Make the code easier to maintain and work with, to facilitate  
others contributing patches, testing, etc.

4) Move towards reusing existing functionality instead of re- 
implementing everything in project* (e.g. followups as comments,  
generic subscribe functionality, actions integration, eventually CCK  
integration, perhaps views + workflow, etc, etc).  This should help  
with #3, as we rip out large portions of ugly code and move towards  
re-using well-supported existing code from other modules.

Chad (aka hunmonk)