[development] Duplicated modules

[Darth Clue]

I'm fairly new to the Drupal community and I'm also still getting over 
having my gallbladder removed so if I make no sense or come across in a 
way that offends you it is not intentional.

I think duplicated modules suck.  They dilute the water and make it more 
difficult to determine what to do if you have no experience with the 
software.  There is no easy solution to this problem.  It's something 
that requires one of the parties to accept that the work they have done 
should be undone which is a hard thing to do.  Feedback from experienced 
users and developers ala DTL is awesome to us noobs.  I dove headlong 
into the process and took over a module that is critical to a project 
that I'm working on.  I took over another module at the request of 
others who wanted to see it ported to D6.  After doing so I discovered 
that there was another module that does about the same thing.  I'm still 
waiting to see what the port of it looks like before I decide whether or 
not they are actually duplicates.  I've considered submitting patches 
for the menu system to enhance it's permissioning but have yet to do so 
due to a lack of time.

Introducing bureaucracy and paperwork into the process will reduce the 
number of people who are willing to spend time on Drupal and will 
degrade it's value.  I spend my day trying to convince others that as a 
CMS Drupal is our best choice because it is open source and because of 
the community that keeps it alive.

People like chx, webchick, and morbus are the very reason that I am 
still using Drupal and still pushing for it's usage in the projects that 
I'm involved in.  Core addresses the basics and stays out of the way 
when I need to do more.

And since it isn't heard enough, THANK YOU, to everyone who contributes 
to Drupal.  Your work, energy, and time have made it easier for me to do 
my job.

Jonathan Dale (aka Darthclue)

Karoly Negyesi wrote:
> Hi,
>
> OK all you wiseasses, now you pissed me off enough to bring these
> issues into wider public, so tell me what to do in these situations.
>
> 1) There is a Drupal module, older than my boots, gets a much needed
> rewrite by two guys. Comes a third one, and he is, of course, welcome
> to the party. There is a discussion of what we do and what we not to
> do. Come next day, said third guy does what we all three agreed not
> do. Following a debate, he packs his toys and starts a new project.
> Said third guy contributes heavily to Drupal project for extremely
> long but quality and quantity does not always correlate.
>
> 2) I hand off privatemsg to another maintainer. He wants to go in a
> direction which neither me nor someone else even higher in the Drupal
> hierarchy agrees with. We all three come to a happy conclusion and the
> new maintainer does not go there. Time passes, and another guy,
> notorious for starting a parallel project, does exactly the thing we
> agreed on not to do and despite he says it was just experiment with
> the new Drupal 6 code, the project lives on.
>
> NK
>
> PS. the project moderation queue would undo Drupal because people
> would take their not-accepted projects off site. php nuke follows.
> PS2. 'mob rule' applied to code does not work. Your precious
> drupalmodules.com which I opposed from day one is an excellent
> example. captcha rated #2 , cck and views not even in #10, give me a
> break, this is broken,.
>
>