[development] Slow down with the official releases of contribalready, ok? ; )

[Larry Garfield]

On Fri, 30 May 2008 10:35:04 -0400, "Darrel O'Pry" <darrel.opry at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think you're completely wrong here. It was by request and popular demand
> from both contrib authors and end users that the current release system
> was
> built. Otherwise the community would not have ponied up the money for the
> work to be done.
> 
> I just think the system should give developers such as myself more freedom
> in versioning our modules. Unlike the rest of the world that are writing
> modules that are only dependent on core.... I'm writing modules that are
> dependent on other Contrib modules, and I would like to be able to reflect
> that in my versioning.

Crazy idea that may already be possible, I've not tried:

One of the issues with -dev is that some module maintainers use it for "mostly stable but I've not fully debugged it yet, please test", while others use it for "dude, it doesn't even compile, it's got syntax errors all over the place, wtf are you using it for?"  And there's no way to tell which is which, and it can even change over time in the same module.

What if we allowed non-pattern-compliant branches, but did not permit the creation of release nodes?  That would allow those with more CVS-fu to do all kinds of wacky "me only" experimental branches but people who still get all their code from drupal.org/projects/* won't even have a way to get to it until it goes into the "main, kinda stable, needs testing" -dev branch (which module maintainers don't even have to make release nodes for if they don't want to, as now).

--Larry Garfield