[development] D7 contrib module development

[Marcel Partap]

Well overall it seems my proposal does not find much support here, but
anyways *g

> There are also parallels here to a comparison of publishing on the
> internet and traditional publishing in print.
Parallels, yes. But software is very different from news articles.

> And millions of people have done that which is why the internet is
> now full of junk
Well it is, and means not only wasting the time of those producing
poor content, but especially of those who don't know how to properly
use the filters.

> Google works its search magic by discovering which pages have the
> most "votes" from incoming links. Collaborative news sites such as
> digg, hacker news, reddit, and others work by voting. The best news
> bubbles up to the top.
Is not. The most popular news does. Quantity before quality - which is
why many people have difficulties penetrating that thick layer of crap
and spam to reach the real quality regions of the internet.

> Both systems of publishing content are filters -- the traditional
> system says -- "publishing is expensive, so we'll filter content
> /before/ publishing." The second system says "we can't stop people
> from publishing -- so let's devise better filters to help the best
> content still come out on top."
But what i am proposing is more like publishing it internally and not
release until a sufficient number of people agree with the quality. Ah
well the metaphor just doesn't hold. :)

> Now I hope I'm not distorting Marcel's argument here (and if I'm
> wrong I'm sure he'll correct me :)
Here i am fullfilling your prediction *g

> when I say he's arguing that there's too many modules, too many
> "bad" developers, writing too much "bad" code and we'd be all
> better off if the module landscape was less messy and more
> prestine.
Well i wouldn't have phrased it so negatively but basically, imho the
current process just leaves to much room for people to fail and
'ungood' stuff to happen.

> Perhaps this is too neat but it seems his argument falls along the
> same lines as those who say we need professional editors to filter
> content before publishing.
But this is a very different matter. The point is not so much to make
'professionals' decide about what goes in and what not, but rather
about a process that, although promoting creativity and innovative
work, in the end guarantees that stuff that goes in is worth being there.

> And I think the drupal community is already working very hard to
> do just that -- provide better filters to point site builders to
> the current "best-of-breed" modules for a given situation.
But why create bad code to filter out in the first place? Setting up a
tighter process for contrib code makes sure that developers do *have*
to make sure they are in line with the Drupal standards. Maybe
filtering out by popularity was enough of a solution for D6. Maybe it
even is for D7 - but changing the process may prove to be even a
better one.

rgds, marcel.

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