[development] how to identify "root" modules?

[Gábor Hojtsy]

On 10/14/07, Cog Rusty <cog.rusty at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Why I investigated this is that I would need a stable solution to
> > > indentify these "root" modules in each project. We know this is system
> > > module in Drupal itself, but collecting a wired in list of "root"
> > > modules for each module suite seems like a bad idea.
> >
> > You could check the dependency tree:
> > Most to all submodules will depend on the "root" module, so you could
> > determine that one by defining it as "the module where count(is_depended_on)
> > is higher than for all other modules". Of course, that comparison has to be
> > restricted to the root folder of each module collection, for which I don't
> > have a good idea on how to reliably determine it.
>
> Dependencies is not such a reliable way. Independent modules can be of
> two kinds. Either the main bare-bones module without additional bells
> and whistles, or auxiliary utility modules which are leaves in the
> dependencies tree. An example is the ecommerce module where there are
> at least two modules on which others depend, "store" (which I believe
> is the main one) and "ec_common", none of which is located in the
> package's root.

Well, I used "root" modules as the module in the given suite, which
should always be enabled, and some of the others depend on it. In this
sense ecommerce has two such modules: ec_common and store. The problem
is identifying at least one of those, not to pick one from a list if
we have more :) I don't think it is a good idea to put these modules
actually in the module suite root, even I would advocate module suites
to have each module in its own directory , unlike views or cck, but
like ecomerce or ubercart. (Although this definitely needs to be
decided on a case by case basis, having folders for each module allow
more space for them to grow).

Gabor