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

[Laura Scott]

On Wednesday 11 March 2009, at 4:12 am, Marcel Partap wrote:

>> Except that those high-profile developers would need to troll
>> through contrib to vote on stuff.
> Would not. On the contrary, all people writing Drupal code could
> handle all Drupal non-core code as a collective.

I see this as one fundamental misconception of what this community is.  
It's a do-ocracy. The results are from people doing -- scratching  
their own itch -- not from people working as drones or workers in a  
hive collective. The best innovation often comes when someone develops  
a better way to build the mousetrap. Forcing that innovation to  
collaborate with the existing hegemony in that feature area or go away  
is not going to be conducive to active development contributions, imho.

In the free market, there are many instances of companies  
"duplicating" efforts out there, often with great success.

There are many cases where "duplications" in contrib have resulted in  
better modules and the deprecation of the previous project. CCK's  
replacing of Flexinode is one example of many. We just did an upgrade  
of a site from 4.7 to 6, and at least half the modules did not have  
upgrade paths. However, nearly all of those had /better/ solutions  
available in Drupal 6, developed by different developers, found under  
different project names. In the end, the website is better than before.

> The people i'd really like to have heard an opinion of are people  
> like Dries, Angela and the maintainers of overly complex modules  
> (CCK and Views mainly) however. But now the jury has made up their  
> mind it is too late for the idea anyways.

This statement, to my mind, is an illustration of why this gatekeeper  
approach could not work effectively in this community. You are stating  
that you are feeling stifled and not getting the response you want.  
Imagine that feeling from every potential contributor to the  
community, who feels he or she has a great idea but the gatekeepers  
are preventing that contribution for whatever reason.

My suggestion is that if you feel this is such an important thing,  
then don't feel stifled, just do it. Create an index of duplicated  
functionalities in projects, make it searchable, tagable, whatever,  
recruit collaborators, and establish the credibility of this approach.  
And attract people through demonstration, proving the concept. Build  
that collective and outperform all the individual efforts out there.

Laura