Development Seed sponsors Drupal 6 core i18n development

Development Seed sponsors the Drupal 6 core i18n development, so we can collaborate on feature development and keep up with Drupal core changes at once. The basic idea is that we need to (temporarily) fork Drupal, so that we can make changes to the core ourselfs, test the code we add and also provide it for others to download and enjoy (ie. fix bugs).

Since these kind of forks (CVS branches) are not technically supported by the Drupal infrastructure, we needed to look elsewhere (but not too far) for a sponsor. Development Seed already sponsored the i18n module efforts by Jose and they offered support for the Drupal 6 core i18n movement at the DrupalCamp/GovCamp meetings in September, so they were a natural supporter.

Development Seed provided us with a subversion repository at cvsdude.com with a handful of accounts possible for those developers who would like to directly contribute to this effort. The directory to commit our files into is already created, and a mailing list is set up to receive commit messages, so you can review what people are changing.

The idea is that we commit a complete Drupal core anonymous CVS checkout into this subversion directory (including the CVS folder themselfs). This way we can modify the code as we see fit, try different approaches, fix bugs and generally work our way towards clean and tried patches to submit to the Drupal issue queue. We are definitely not aiming to create a megapatch, but to produce smaller ones. Since we are going to have the CVS administrative files there too, we can later follow up with Drupal core (ie. merge changes from "that branch" with our changes). Since we use an anonymous Drupal core checkout, anyone can do the merge, when need be. It should also be pointed out that this subversion repository can be checked out anonymously, so you will be able to test code, suggest changes even if you will have no account for this repository.

svn co http://svn3.cvsdude.com/devseed/sandbox/i18n

We will hopefully be able to effectively collaborate on the i18n movement using this infrastructure, and the open nature of our development will allow us to produce code will quickly go through the issue queue and get applied to Drupal itself. Support us with your attention, ideas, testing and other suggestions, to reach our goal!

If you would like to take part in code development directly, please get in touch with me, and I will direct your subversion account request to Ian Ward.