[development] Fwd: Drupal.org uprade: contributed module dependencies

[Gordon Heydon]

Hi,

Karoly Negyesi wrote:
> Hi,
> 

...

> Also, please consider breaking the tradition. There is no realistic
> chance views 2 being ready for Drupal 6 this year and that seems a
> crucial problem. There are some other "little" pieces and bits.
> 

Actually I think this is a sign of another underlying problem that the
exponential growth of the community has caused.

In previous release cycles at this time most of the major projects have
been ported, so they are at least working if not ready for the next
stable release of Drupal.

One of the biggest changes at least what I think is that now is that
most of the developers are now doing this full time and setting the
balance between paid work and fun development of contributed modules
sometimes becomes very hard.

I know myself with e-Commerce realistically I don't see use getting out
a completely new stable version until early Feb which is 2 months away.
And I will still need to convert it to Drupal 6.

ATM I feel that majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to coding is
still being done by a small group of people. I know the bar is being
lowered when it comes to developing for Drupal (developing != coding) as
it is a lot more point and click to get Drupal to do things.

I think we need to find ways to get the coders working on the major
contributed modules like  views and cck (if we do not have these modules
at the release of Drupal 6 it will be very bad) working on getting the
Drupal 6 releases done.

Maybe the Drupal Association needs to not only deal with the
infrastructure but maybe also look at bringing on some full time coders
whos job it is to not only code for Core, but also run around the edges
and bring some of the more important contributed modules up to the next
release.

I think with the release of Drupal 6 we really not in a time crunch as
Drupal 5 still has some teeth and we are still doing quite amazing
things with it. It is not like when we were doing the 4.7 release and
everyone was clambering to get sites onto it. If I am still releasing
sites on Drupal 5.x I don't think that it is stopping me from still
putting out great sites.

We do need to make sure the major contributed modules are all go at the
time of the Drupal 6 release. I know myself that I couldn't deploy sites
without views and cck (I could but I don't want to go back to the dark
old days before views and cck) and there are most likely other modules
that people would consider show stoppers.

I think that Drupal 6 is a different release than any of the previous
releases of Drupal. We have modules outside of core which we need before
we can more forward.

Gordon.