[development] Module developers, please do *proper* releases !

[Derek Wright]

On Feb 19, 2008, at 8:19 AM, Moshe Weitzman wrote:

> drush pm install panels

Right.  Drupal can't have its cake and eat it too.  Everyone wants  
painless (even automatic, but I would never support that) upgrades  
for Drupal.  The *only* way that's going to work long term is if  
contrib maintainers start doing more responsible release management.   
Which is why everyone should attend my talk at DrupalCon about this:

http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/session/how-effectively-maintain-and- 
release-your-drupal-contributions

The premise of my talk is that assuming you spend the 1.5 hours to  
attend (or listen remotely if you can't be there in person), you'll  
come away *understanding* the process and the tools available to you  
to help.  At that point, it will *save* you time if you start Doing  
It Right(tm).

All talk of cathedral vs. bazaar, and definitely of the GPL, is  
completely orthogonal to this discussion and thread.  None of this  
has anything to do with any of that (take it from me, a long-haired  
commie pinko).  This is just a simple question of how not to make  
life miserable for the people trying to use your code.

The starting point for my talk is basically this:

a) As a contributor, no one forces you to do anything (scratch own  
itch).
b) Drupal loves it when you contribute your code back to d.o.
c) Once you contribute your code upstream, you're saying other people  
should use it, and *at that point* you start to have some  
responsibility to your users.

Anyway, please come to the talk. ;)

Oh, and everyone interested in the quality metrics stuff should come  
to the d.o redesign panel:

http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/session/drupalorg-redesign-panel

In fact, we should probably schedule a whole boaf session about  
that.  I don't know if anyone did that already...

Cheers,
-Derek (dww)