Drupal: One core, many distributions
This is an old post I sent to drupal-devel mailing list more than 3 years ago, I would like to revive as I think finally the small core / many distributions idea is gaining some ground. I haven't changed anything from the original post here, http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2005-November/011428.html
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A "great developer platform" is how I see Drupal, and I'm sure most of the developers too. But the thing is: we need some focus, some targets to agree on.
The problem is: currently we are pretending Drupal -core- to be too many things at the same time, mostly that great developer platform (1), but also an out of the box ready to use community portal (2) or kind of that. And the consequence is we are handling too many issues when fixing bugs for 'Drupal core' that are too specific of some more 'user level, site specific' modules.
The main point is *core shouldn't need to be an out of the box nice site* that anyone can use, and we need to jump in the *one core, many distributions* idea for that. And that need to be an out of the box nice site is actually consuming far more effort than what could be a proper CMS core.
IMHO we are wasting efforts in some higher level modules, that should be more focused to get what is properly the core system working right in the first place. And I'm not making any judgement about which modules should be in core and which ones not. I mean,, ok to have a few nice modules in core, but when a module grows too much, because people wants all that nice features, and them to be easy to set up, we can a) move it out of 'core' or b) provide a basic one in core that can be extended by a contrib module.
Just as an example -and I have nothing against forum module: At some point, we are duplicating the taxonomy interface to handle a forum specific vocabulary. Then, this causes some bug -like this one, again just an example: http://drupal.org/node/24274 -, and then we have a
*core bug*, module specific, but as it is a core module, this one has the same importance -in the bug tracking system- as any other critical bug -like a basic API not working properly.
Notice that on one side we have a very big module in core to handle forums, but on the other side we don't have an small one for what could be a badly needed feature for other modules to build upon: a basic image node module. -again just an example, but I'm not talking about forum vs image at all.
And as a side effect... How many modules you need to patch for what could be a small 'core patch' -if core was smaller- before your patch can be even considered because you can say at least 'it applys to HEAD' ?? And how many modules you need to re-patch again because of a minimum detail has changed in the main core patch during the follow up on the issue tracker?
So I want to insist on the idea of "many distributions to serve different sites, one core to serve them all" --nice 'mantra', isn't it? ;-)
But, anyway, that's an old idea. Just look at Linux.... Could you install 'Linux' --properly understood as the core OS- and pretend you have a nice OS ready to play with your computer?
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