[development] How could everyone win and get Views in Drupal 8?

[Earl Miles]

Jamie Holly wrote:
> Yeah I agree we really need to keep Drupal lean. I wouldn't want to see 
> the entire Views package integrated as-is. I wouldn't mind some of the 
> functionality included 

This one drives me crazy. There really isn't a 'some'. There is no Views 
lite. Stripping out functionality does not make Views lighter, it just 
makes it less useful, and that is ultimately harmful. The reason Views 
is useful is because it is flexible.

The reason it seems like it is 'heavy' is because it's defining handlers 
to deal with a couple dozen core tables, hundreds of core fields, half a 
dozen different styles (table, unformatted, node view, rss, etc). It is 
replacing a LOT of core functionality. When it goes into core, a lot of 
core code just gets thrown away.

Anyway, people who have this attitude are really saying they don't want 
Views in core. That's fine, but what that really means is that core 
doesn't get the benefit of Views functionality. It degrades the overall 
user experience and it creates a lot of dead code in core that mostly is 
never used because 90% (or more) of the people using Drupal install 
Views anyway. (Right now, statistically, views is on 60% of all 
reporting Drupal sites).

Also, one day I may not be able to maintain Views. I don't want to sound 
like an asshole...but I am an asshole. Every one who doesn't want Views 
in core had better consider the day that I move on from my current 
position, and am no longer able to maintain Views more or less full time 
on someone else's dime. If it's not in core, it could just become 
another unmaintained contrib module. Core is maintained by a large 
community. Views is maintained 95% by me and 5% by a handfull of other 
people who've gotten into it enough to understand it.

But also, and this is the real reason: Core would be *better* with Views 
in it. Views in core is actually part of the #smallcore ideal, IMO, 
because it lets us do a better job of reducing core to APIs and building 
the Application on top of it, rather than core being half framework and 
half application, like it is now.