[development] Reviewing patches and making decisions

[Chris Johnson]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 6:35 AM, Nathaniel Catchpole
<catch56 at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Almost. Issues fixing bugs that are still bugs in the next major release
> should always be fixed in that release first, then backported to Drupal 6
> and/or Drupal 5.
>
> That way, we don't have bugs fixed in Drupal 6 which then crop up again in
> Drupal 7, and there's also much more active development there, which
> generally means more people available to review and refine proposed fixes
> for any given issue.


This has always been the assumption -- that there is more development
in the newest version than in older versions.  But it has always just
been an assumption without proof -- and even I feel it was probably
true most of the time, or in the past.

If one only measures core development, than of course it's true,
simply because past core releases are essentially frozen except
security fixes.

But right now, I would bet far more effort is being spent on Drupal 6
development than on Drupal 7 development.  And it's part of this
topic's problem.

Issues and patches are piling up in the Drupal 6 issue queues, but the
push is to look at Drupal 7 development.

For example, I'm spending 100% of my effort to build Drupal 6
websites.  I find a bunch of bugs in D6.  I write issues and post
patches.  My motivation to check for the same problem in D7 and then
develop a D7 patch, is going to be considerably less than my
motivation for D6.  I might not even be able to do that, if the D7
code is not sufficiently ready or stable.  If I'm already waiting for
patches to be applied to D6 modules, I'm not going to be interested in
waiting even longer to have them applied to D7 and then get backported
to D6.  I need the fix yesterday, not next year.

Really it's all about every member of the community having a different
agenda, and everyone is negotiating with the community to get as much
support for their own agenda as possible.  Some people have more
influence than others or more power than others in these negotiations
(the Drupal community is much like the rest of life in this regard,
after all).

The question is whether the majority should continue to be facilitate
the agenda of the minority, or if the majority should stand up, notice
that it is the majority, and push more strongly for what they want.