[development] Drupal 5 incremental release?

[Derek Wright]

On Jul 20, 2007, at 8:53 PM, Caleb Gilbert wrote:

> That's fine, but wouldn't it be more expedient to open the scrutiny  
> of the api's to the entire Drupal community?

Neither the issue queue nor the dev snapshot release are kept secret  
from anyone.

> Any one individual (or even a handful of individuals) is going to  
> have a more limited amount of time to research, document, and fix  
> the existing issues with Drupal 5.x-dev than if the entire Drupal 5  
> user base is looking at things.

Then people who care should look at things.  Please help.

> I guess I don't understand the reasons for not releasing something  
> at this point.

We're working on a release.  No one's fundamentally opposed to  
another point release, it's just a question of resources of the  
people working on the release and the quantity and quality of the  
people helping.

We can't put out another "stable" release that we expect 1000s of  
Drupal sites to upgrade to if there are important, known bugs (like  
changing the stable API in some way that breaks some contrib modules).

> Considering that 5.1 was released within 2 weeks of the 5.0  
> release, at time frame which could almost be considered as  
> "concurrent" with the 5.0 release given the larger perspective of  
> time, it's not much of a stretch to say that the 5.0 branch has  
> never really been updated since being released (to quibble I guess  
> the more technically correct term is that it's been "hardly" updated).

There you are wrong.  Look at the CVS activity in the core repository  
between the DRUPAL-5-1 tag and the end of the DRUPAL-5 branch.  It's  
already changed a lot.  A number of bugs, large and small, have been  
fixed.  But, we can't break anyone's site with the next release, so  
we have to give it a lot of care before we ship it.  In fact, I'd  
argue that another stable release months after the initial new  
version is more difficult and requires more care than a new X.0  
release.  When 6.0 comes out, only a handful of sites will  
immediately switch to it, and only a (hopefully large) fraction of  
contribs will be ported to it.  5.2 on the other hand will  
immediately be put into action by a clear majority of all Drupal  
sites in the world.

As with every new release of core, if you want it sooner, then help  
make it happen.  The issue queue is usually where you can be most  
effective.  Darren already posted a useful link to the issue queue,  
please read the comments, test the patches, and provide your input.   
You can always search for 5.x-specific bugs in the queue, and review,  
test, and/or provide patches where needed.

Cheers,
-Derek (dww)