[development] Very concerned over Drupal's core development

[David Metzler]

IMHO, we'd have to have a different stance on backward compatibility  
if we were planning on shortening release cycles much.  The linux  
Kernel does not require significant refactoring of code built on top  
of it every 6 months. I'm still not sure if I have a migration path  
identified for my universities drupal sites with D6, even though I've  
already ported all of my modules to D6. It is possible that much of  
the interesting work about extending drupal really is properly in  
contrib and not in Core. The fact that most of what I hear being  
touted as new features for drupal 6/7 are the movement of contrib  
support into core is not necessarily a bad thing.  It''s pretty  
proven code after all.  I think finding a pathway to move old stuff  
out of core is not necessarily a bad idea either.  Strikes me as the  
pathway for evolution of drupal.

I think think the right answer about drupal stagnating was really  
about having Views, Panels, and WYSIWG api all going through major  
refactoring on D6, all lagging significantly the D6 release. I know  
it's why I'm not using my own D6 ported modules in any production  
sites yet.

Dave


On Apr 20, 2009, at 2:19 PM, Dries Buytaert wrote:

> 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/