[development] Some of core to contrib?

[David Metzler]

I'm confused about one point here.  I must confess that although I  
don't have a lot of experience with Test driven development, I've  
done some of it and am familiar with the concepts. Are we sure that  
drupal.org provides automated  testing infrastructure for contrib? I  
don't quite understand how that works given the possibilites of  
module conflicts and dependencies.  If you say it works and can point  
to an example of a test driven contrib supported by d.o, I'll happily  
withdraw this concern, but I've always assumed that contrib test  
driven development couldn't happen, but that contrib providers would  
need their own infrastructure.

Although my own module list of contrib to remove doesn't include  
comments or aggregator, I'm certainly ok with seeing contrib's  
removed from core, but I think there's value in having a small set of  
useful simple modules track with core and therefor get tests run for  
it (assuming I'm right about testing support).

Dave

On Apr 20, 2009, at 4:01 PM, Karoly Negyesi wrote:

> Hi,
>
> So it seems there is quite some talk about moving some of the core to
> contrib. This talk comes up from time but we did not have testing and
> now we do. And that makes a big, big difference, I tell you.
>
> So let's suppose that aggregator gets moved into contrib. Every core
> tarball still contains aggregator, the latest tag from the DRUPAL-7--1
> branch. But the aggregator people can churn out bugfixes as fast as
> they can and the tests will make sure they won't break stuff.
> Meanwhile, new features can get into DRUPAL-7--2. Every user can use
> --2 invidually, core will come with --1 still. Also, they maintain a
> DRUPAL-8--1 branch and for every unstable/beta/RC they make sure they
> have ported aggregator and tag similarly as core does (we can punt
> some of the unstables -- I could understand that not every module gets
> DBTNG'd immediately it did not happen anyways). Let's list the
> benefits again:
>
> *) if a company is interested in a module it can grow a community
> around much easier than with core. They can both release bugfixes and
> features.
> *) core does not lose the feedback from its modules
>
> Possible problems:
>
> *) lose of maintenance
> *) additional burden on these maintainers w/ HEAD compatibility.
>
> Also, aspiring projects can opt for core inclusion (if they accept
> that a branch can not break APIs and willing to tag along with core)
> which can be much easier this way. Let's face it, there are much
> higher quality contribs than the mess called comment module so why
> not?
>
> There is the small problem of how can people using cvs update core
> now, do they need to run a cvs up for every directory? Hardly. We can
> create a 'mirror' which pulls together the commits. This is an easily
> doable (and yes I am willing to script it).
>
> Regards
>
> Karoly Negyesi