[development] Very concerned over Drupal's core development

[Earnie Boyd]

Quoting Karoly Negyesi <karoly at negyesi.net>:

> Hi,
>
> I know there are many patches are written, reviewed and committed
> still. But, without intending to  critique of anyone in particular, I
> see a very dangerous cycle:
>
> As Drupal 5 and 6 are very good, rock solid releases, people are
> satisfied and very busy there, much less is the need, the drive and
> the availability for core development. This means less patches are
> written. Also core got bigger. Very, very few people touch
> actions/triggers, fields, filter system, openid or for that matter,
> menu just to name a few. Once a patch is written , it needs a review.
> However, the testing bot, curiously, made patch reviews even harder --
> no longer can a novice just install a patch, click around and report
> back "works" ( the testing bot, of course added a lot of quality to
> Drupal, I am not saying, down with the bot). This has very severe
> consequences: we always had too few reviewers and now the entry
> barrier is even harder as you need to do meaningful code reviews all
> the time. Low reviewer activity means patches do not get 'bumped' and
> they linger. Lingering is exacerbated by the loss of Steven and that
> the single guy who can call the big decisions now has a kid (soon two)
> and two companies to run. Of course, this leads to frustration on
> behalf of the patch writers and even less patches get written or
> reviewed and people draw back into their own little contrib empire
> where they call the shots...
>

While I review a few drupal core patches once in a while, there are  
still many prime modules needing a stable port to D6; xmlsitemap for  
example.  I'm putting most of my time into trying to get things like  
this module working so I can port my sites to D6.  Otherwise D7 is  
just a waste of time since upgrading to it requires upgrading to D6  
first.

--
Earnie
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