[development] module duplication in Drupal contrib

[Larry Garfield]

On Tuesday 25 March 2008, Steven Jones wrote:
> Not entirely sure how feasible this would be but...
>
> When I used media temple for hosting, and you had a problem, you'd
> fill in a form to get technical support, but you'd hit submit and it'd
> suggest some KB articles to look at that were 'similar'. If none of
> those really answered the problem then you could submit a new issue.
>
> In the same way when you submit a new module it would be cool if d.o
> somehow suggested similar modules (based on keywords maybe) and then
> rather than blindly creating a new module you'd get some help finding
> duplicates.

By then it's too late; I usually write a module first, then add it to CVS, 
then go create the project node.  In fact, you have to add the new module to 
CVS first, I believe.  If you don't get a dupe check until you're creating 
the project node, all it will tell you is "guess what, you just wasted X 
hours on that module!  Submit it anyway and be frustrated? Y/N" :-)

Make modules more findable, and let developers use their judgment in a fully 
informed manner.

> Side note: Not having *any* metrics for projects on d.o is a very
> serious problem.

Better no metrics than bad metrics.  If, for instance, we rated module quality 
strictly on the number of open support requests there were in the issue 
queue, Views would come out as a module to never ever ever use.  That would 
also be quite wrong. :-)

-- 
Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
larry at garfieldtech.com		ICQ: 6817012

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