[development] Very concerned over Drupal's core development

[Thomas Zahreddin]

Am Montag, den 20.04.2009, 18:09 +0200 schrieb Eric Schaefer:
> Some word from the contrib side of drupal:
> 
> Why am I not participating in reviews of core patches? Naked fear. How
> could I possibly understand whats going on in core? Although I am
> using and developing for drupal since version 3.somthing (??) I still
> have problems with the inner workings of drupal. One reason for this
> is the fact that core is a moving target. All kinds of APIs change
> between major releases. 

> Joe Contrib Developer (thats me) does not
> understand why. 

the answers to the question 'Why ..' are often design decisions and
these are maybe documented, e.g. in issues, mailinglist, IRC,
groups.drupal.org  - but often in a form nobody can tell from that
documentation what the decision is.

> I am sure those changes are important, but I don't
> understand them. I just fought a furious fight with the fapi last
> weekend. Something that was working fine 5.x is behaving strangely in
> 6.x. If I am not understanding the USE of those APIs how can I judge
> patches to the code behind them? Solution: Dunno. Maybe extensive
> documentation? Not just docs for the APIs, but docs about the
> functionality and docs about design decisions. Such docs would also
> aid ports of modules to new core releases since devs would loose fear.
..

The question behind is:
how are design decisions made _and_ coordinated? 


my suggestion form e.g. Nov. 2008
original: 
http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2008-November/031354.html

"
..
If the group of persons working on a module keeps a logbook about their 
decisions, then everybody is able to follow the decisions regarding a module.

A short description of this method of dynamic selfgovernance can be found on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy

or as free pdf 
http://www.governancealive.com/Links/The_Creative_Forces_of_Self_Organization.pdf

A longer description is in 
Buck, John and Sharon Villines (2007). We the People: Consenting to a Deeper 
Democracy, A Guide to Sociocraty

"

So what do you think now of a _log_ for requirements and design decisions for core, APIs and modules?


> 
> One more thought about the docs: Maybe everything is I would need to
> loose fear is documented. But where? I always get lost in the drupal
> documentation...
> 
> My 0.02€,
> Eric