[development] Drupal 7 "When it's Ready"

[Michael Favia]

Matt Chapman wrote:
> I agree entirely that the expanding gap between core & contrib is a 
> major problem, and one that seems to be underestimated by some core 
> developers.
>
> However, I'm slightly concerned that establishing a set of golden 
> modules in this way will stifle the evolution by natural selection 
> that has served Drupal so well. To make the point, imagine if it had 
> been decided that Drupal 5 was not ready for release until Flexinode 
> was updated....
Thank you for echoing my concerns exactly. This is a key tenet of the 
success of opensource. Unfortunately, i think that any attempt to define 
specific modules or even specific use cases (profiles) will fail in a 
similar fashion because the same argument applies to the use cases as 
each new version changes the capabilities of our platform and makes it 
more apt to various tasks and less apt to others.

I agree that the lag of module upgrade between 5 and 6 was undesirable 
but i don't think that it can be prevented with the increasing number of 
dependencies that are developing around important modules these days. 
Any attempt to do so would unwisely slow the pace of development in core 
and put us at a competitive disadvantage against other CMSs.

Identifying the successful modules with many dependencies and 
incorporating them into core in an efficient matter seems to be key in 
preventing another lag similar to the last. With cck on its way in and 
views shortly behind i think that the worts may be behind us. Paradigm 
shifts arent easy. :)
--
Michael Favia