[development] Very concerned over Drupal's core development

[Dries Buytaert]

Something else which is worth to discuss.

In private conversations, various people have expressed concerns that
our release cycles are too long, and that, as a result, they are not
interested in working on core.  If they have a problem, and they fix
it in core, they have to wait 1-2 years before they can actual use
their own improvement in a production environment.  In a lot of cases,
people don't bother with it because they can't wait that long.

We see evidence of that around code freeze time, when people actually
do start to bother and patches tend to move through the review cycle
quite a bit faster -- creating it own set of frustrations.

In other words, moving to shorter release cycles could help.  Not only
does it increase the incentive for people to work on core, it could
also provide additional focus.  Because we have been working on Drupal
6 so long, people might have lost some of their incentive and
motivation.  There is a certain engery-cycle/rhythm that we might have
broken with the longer Drupal 6 development cycle.

In fact, a lot of big projects, like the Linux kernel, Gnome, KDE,
Ubuntu, Fedora and Wordpress all switched to 6 month release cycles.
Mark Shuttleworth posted some good insights about that in a recent
blog post: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/288.  I'm not
suggesting that we should switch to 6 month release cycles, I'm merely
bringing it up to get feedback on the idea.


On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 11:03 PM, Dries Buytaert
<dries.buytaert at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think catch hits a lot of good points about how our reward and trust
> system could be improved.  I'm all for better profile pages, giving
> credit where credit is due, and providing better visibility into who
> is working on what.  It might be useful to provide a "Reviewer rating"
> or "Reviewer score" -- something which could be an incentive for more
> people to review patches.  Maybe this can be accomplished through some
> project module extensions?  I'm not sure what the best approach would
> be, but it is worthy of a discussion.

-- 
Dries Buytaert :: http://buytaert.net/