[development] Drupal's CVS policies... including 'foriegn' codein TinyMCE module?

[andy at spiders-lair.com]

  I've been watching this thread for a while and think it's time to chime in (on a personal basis, not as a d.o CVS Admin).

Developers need to be aware that Core has it's own CVS repository to Contrib and it's policies are decided solely by the Core Committers team, so using the "jQuery got in" is a moot point imho.

As I see it, the commit of 3rd party libraries in Contrib generally should not be allowed as:-

a) It basically creates a duplicate code repository of code that should be availble from a single authoritive source.
b) Uses Drupal.Org resources to effectively host "someone elses work".
c) It's potentially a security risk, especially if maintainership is slack. Although problems aren't Drupal related directly it presents a sloppy view of the project as a whole imho.

I am of the personal opinion however that, where effective, certain pieces of work should be allowed into Contrib when it meets a certain criteria or benchmark. For example, where a 3rd party library is heavily modified to make it more suitable directly and solely for use with Drupal and hence the target is audience is Drupal specific. Such a decision would be based on a case by case merit of "how that commit makes Drupal end users lives so much the better". The only argument against this that I can think of is "who and how makes the decision" as it's basically more work on a volunteer workforce. Well, I suppose discussions like this are the best way :)

I think it's fair to say that if such a policy existed, this thread has demonstrated (to me at least) that the maintainers of TinyMCE have successfully argued their case and would be the first Contrib "to pass the acid test" and be permitted to commit it's 3rd party library assuming they have the kind backing of the original authors of the 3rd party library.

But I'm still of the opinion that generally (and blindly) committing 3rd party libraries (especially unmodified versions) into Contrib CVS should not happen.

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--Andy (AjK)