[development] RFC: drupal as a moving target

[Victor Kane]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 9:32 AM, Simon Hobbs <simon at emspace.com.au> wrote:

> We really need a D5 appreciation club for those who /choose/ not to
> upgrade. When I reach Level 9 in http://kingdomofloathing.com I am
> going to start that very clan.
>
> sime


I already started it! So count me in!

See my blog post:

"And now for something completely different: Drupal - the quiet revolution"

http://awebfactory.com.ar/node/296

In all seriousness, I think a couple of things are becoming very clear in
this very illuminating and interesting thread (some very courageous people,
although there is a lot of negation and euphoria going on):

1. Without Drupal "users" Drupal would not be the success it is today. They
are working hard every day for a living, making sites for people.

2. Without Drupal "core coders" Drupal would not be the success it is today.
They are working very hard every day making Drupal 7.

3. These two groups need to listen to each other closely, and plan, and keep
the synergy going the best they can. It's all good, given the general crisis
going on all around.

4. My own opinion in terms of recommendations for users:
Drupal has a very long development cycle, similar to Debian, if you can see
beyond the hype (necessary hype in order to compete, to posture so as to try
to avoid the fallout from the world crisis, I guess, but hype nonetheless:
widgets, anyone?).

The truth of the matter is: Drupal 5.x was a big milestone. Drupal 7 will be
the next one.

So, use 5.x for production, then plan for a major upgrade to Drupal 7 in
about a year. Drupal 6.x will be a very rocky road (very necessary for this
to happen, some important refactoring going on, module updates might not
play nice with production data, core and module updates might not play nice
at all with use of core and contrib API's, nor should they: this is an
experimental version) a rocky road towards the stable and "real MacCoy"
version Drupal 7: as someone said, the Drupal "LTS" release.

The main trouble we have for Drupal 5.x a year from now will be security
releases, and the backwardness of jQuery update, which correctly assumed
Drupal 6 would take care of business, but in light of things, that may need
an evaluation: we should work together to get both of these things done.

And remember, a year from now, Drupal 7 will almost be ready, and will not
take so long to become stable, since the cck and views rewrites are going on
now, it will just be a matter of porting.

5. A word to "core developers": I applaud the tremendous courage to do a
complete rewrite on cck and views, which will both fit in in spectacular
fashion with panels 2 and nodequeue and services and media mover and... the
list goes on..... to make an absolutely blockbuster CMS and web application
framework. It is well worth waiting a year for. I only wish I had more time
to help directly, but my destiny right now is to use Drupal and help others
who are using Drupal. That is also a form of testing. And we will be testing
all of this like crazy, us parasitical working stiffs who actually use
Drupal to make a living, we will be testing this like crazy as we prepare
our upgrades from 5.x - {6.x} - 7.x

The only real question of concern is whether all of this effort can survive
the current world crisis, but even I have to admit that is off topic. But it
is on topic when a lot of assumptions are made about ascending curves.

7. And we must all take into account, that Drupal 8-9 will have to go
through another serious refactoring to stay alive, to take care of the code
debt which is accumulating all the while and only partially offset by the
stable, great and beautiful Drupal 7. But by then all of us will be more
mature :)

I think that if we look at it this way, then the picture starts to fit
together and we can stop feeling so frustrated with each other! Practically
everyone on this discussion thread has contributed awesomely to piece
together a clearer picture.

This is not a repetition of previous new release cycles at all.

Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar
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