[development] D7 contrib module development

[Matt Chapman]

Daniel F. Kudwien wrote:
> Now your users start crying for a feature that Notify module does not
> provide.  You create a patch for it, it gets committed, and Notify module is
> one more step closer to be a full duplicate of other notification modules.
>   

If you had read the project page or the issue queue for notify, you 
would not have said this. I have a number of issue threads that end in 
'I found this other combination of modules to do what I wanted' and I'm 
thrilled, because, as I said, I don't believe that duplicate modules are 
necessarily competitors.

The solution is not always to eliminate modules that duplicate 
functionality; the key is to educate maintainers about the other 
modules, so that they can effectively recommend the best solutions to 
crying users.

Much like the discussions of backward compatibility, if people would get 
out of the academic theory and actually read/write/port/use the code, 
we'd avoid a lot of needless FUD and abstract arguments that produce 
nothing.

(I'm not referring specifically to Daniel's comments here; he & I are 
largely in agreement on the issue, I think.)

Best,

Matt