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

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

On Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:45:14 +0100
Marcel Partap <mpartap at gmx.net> wrote:

> > I could even imagine that the content of this queue can be very
> > interesting for all Drupalers
> Well that's the point. Have all Drupalers maintain the modules,
> not just a specific maintainer. Just like core, but supported by
> better tools..

That's not going to happen. Wine and the kernel are far different
projects.

There are already few reviewers for core. Don't expect to have
reviewers for contrib.

It is clearer how core gains from public review.
It's not that clear how a maintainer may gain from code review.
I'm not talking about quality of code... I'm talking about the
interest of the maintainers.

Core and contrib are quite different in terms of speed of
development, purposes, design, coders sub-communities...

People may use drupal infrastructure just if:
- They're looking for public review
- They're looking for co-maintainers
- They're looking for exposure
- They just feel "generous" and they think someone else may make good
  use of their code without bothering them

Release early, release often refers to your users... not to everyone.
If I can't release early and often for *my users* because someone
else is not going to review my patch, I'm going to move my stuff
elsewhere. If someone is pushing my module in a direction that
doesn't fit *my users* I'm going to resist to the change.

Very frequently the maintainer of a module is the one that keeps
contributing the module most.

You're starting from the unproved assumption that for every
maintainer code review and exposure are a larger benefit than keep
on being the steering committee of its own project and that drupal
benefit more from a supposed increase of code quality and reduction
in duplication than having a prolific competitive community of
contributors.
Otherwise you're heading to balkanization of contrib repositories. 

While I agree that natural selection may be suboptimal and
rationally planning and channelling efforts may achieve better
results in a shorter time[1]... natural selection is self testing
and it already happens with no extra effort.
Other theories have to be proved and require efforts to be put in
practice.

Now... if you've something better to substitute to natural selection
and you can prove it is better, that's just the starting point as
Laura Scott pointed out at the end of her post.
If no one feels your hypothesis is worth a test, provide your own
test.
Then maybe you'll reach the point where "d(em)ocracy" and evolution
sucks and you may start complaining ;)
Otherwise there is no reason to accept "intelligent design" as a
real competitor.

[1] let's turn this into a flamewar about XP vs. waterfall vs.
academia vs. corporate vs. opensource vs. emacs as well ;)

-- 
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
http://www.webthatworks.it