Posted by pwolanin on April 28, 2010 at 10:46pm
I think this group should be deleted and merged with http://groups.drupal.org/improvements-core and/or http://groups.drupal.org/unofficial-drupal-roadmap
I'll plan to do so in 1 week unless there is a clear reason this needs to be a separate group.
Comments
Focused group
This is a group to coordinate efforts around one relatively large refactoring, not a general discussion group for improvements or general roadmap items. Some of the items it touches on have been posted to the core improvements group, and if the plan for the later phases of this project come together as cleanly as we hope, it could be added to the 'unofficial roadmap' group, but for the time being I think it's too far along for the general-improvements group and not far enough for the roadmap.
Well, both of those groups
Well, both of those groups have really minimal traffic, but at least meaningful names.
Having to spend time rejecting groups here as a moderator, I oppose a proliferation of short-term groups.
Duration
Yeah, I can see that -- by 'short term' I can envision this group being persistent for a least a year or two if the initial planning stage shows promise. The current round of architecture has received a fair bit of traffic and the next round is being ironed out right now, in response to that feedback. It'll be posted here as well, as will the rest of the work.
The rough outline that is being proposed covers a LOT of ground in Drupal, and each phase will need to be planned carefully. Which is one of the reasons why a distinct group was formed rather than bum-rushing another one of the groups and taking it over entirely.
Your judgment call, but I think there's no harm in preserving it as it is for the time being.
Origins of the Butler name
I asked eaton why this is called Butler, and he said that he gave a lightening talk at the Core Developer's Summit about this, and in the last slide he had a picture of Jeeves and Wooster and said, "We don't need a switchboard operator, and we don't need a bellhop. We need a butler."
We've been linking off to this page and mentioning it a number of times on the Lullabot and Drupal Voices podcasts, and so it'd probably be helpful to have some sort of thumbnail explanation at the top of the Groups page. But just wanted to share the origins of the inside joke since the "temporary" name seems like it'll persist for a while until it's changed.
Like Fields in Core
This is intended as a working group for a very large project that may span multiple Drupal versions to complete, and will likely involve a number of contrib modules as well. It's on the scale of (actually potentially larger than) the Fields in Core initiative, which still has a separate WG from the "core improvements" one.
I agree the name here can use work (we couldn't come up with anything better when it was created), but it's not just incremental core improvements.