[development] An alternative to common thinking in 5->6 migration

[Anton]

2009/3/10 Marcel Partap <mpartap at gmx.net>:
>
>> this existing (and seemingly interminable) discussion
>> where it wont get the attention it deserves.
>
> I highly value your appreciation for my attempt to evaluate solutions to one
> of drupal's biggest problems. Thank you so much.

Marcel, I don't know if you've noticed but you haven't managed to
visibly convince anyone your solution is a good one. Especially not
anyone who will bother to try and implement it.

On the contrary, you have a whole host of people saying it isn't a
good idea and giving reasons why. These people (not me mind you) are
the dedicated volunteers that do actually work hard to implement
solutions to Drupals problems, and are each in their own way
personally responsible for the current success of Drupal today. They
do understand the background and developer culture of the community,
and the reasons behind Drupals success.

Don't take this personally, but your idea and justifications for it
have an air of either ivory tower academia or heavyweight process
driven enterprise thinking about them. Neither of which have a very
good track record of actually getting things done in a volunteer
driven open source community where inspiration and enthusiasm is the
biggest driver behind doing anything.

I started using Drupal when it was a practically unknown project and
have seen it grow to be probably the 2nd most popular open source CMS
out there and possibly the biggest in terms of developer community.
The rate of progress in both Drupal and the supporting infrastructure
over that time has been staggering. It's a tall order claiming that
the environment or culture that achieved that success is broken -
especially since people have come along and announced that plenty of
times in the past. Why should that claim be correct now, when it has
been shown to be false in the past?

Your proposal to have every D7 contrib commit vetted by some sort of
vote would just drive away the very enthusiasm and inspiration that
drew in all the newbie contrib developers that grew up into veteran
developers and core contributers (and that would be the single best
way to kill Drupal). I certainly wouldn't bother releasing any Drupal
7 modules if that were the case. And for a lot of modules (eg my own),
they simply don't have a user base capable of evaluating the quality
of the commit - they will just vote for it anyway so they can get
their hands on the bug fix or new feature they desperately need. In
nearly all cases, the people doing the voting will know far less about
coding or the internals of the module than the author. It won't change
much in terms of code quality - it will just add frustration to
everyones experience.

-- 
Cheers
Anton