project module

For this Summer of Code, I'll apply for reworking the Project module to free it of CVS specifics. The greater plan is, of course, to get SVN support into project.module (and pave the way for other RCS backends), but if I am to believe knowledgable developers like dww and chx, getting the revision control functionality abstracted out into an RCS API module is already a lot of work. In case it should work out faster than expected ("unlikely" :D ) I figure I can still do the SVN specific bits in the time that remains.

You can find my application here. It's essentially complete, but before submitting it to Google I'm still waiting for feedback from dww, and yours can be helpful as well! As a short teaser, here's the introductory part of my application as copied from my website:

Cross-posting from http://drupal.org/node/77562 ...

We've seen explosive growth in 2005 and 2006 based the ability for Drupal sites to rapidly deploy new features that meet real world customer needs, not just fulfill technical requirements. This project aims to increase consultant and site administrators ability to effectively manage releases, security, versioning, issue tracking, and feature deployment into customer ready production environments. By directly improving the Drupal.org release and project management infrastructure we will speed up the life cycle for meeting customer and user requirements and ultimately improve the ability to manage Drupal web sites. Donating to this effort (via the PayPal link on the full proposal) provides funding to accelerate volunteer contributions the Drupal.org project maintainers have made over the past 8 months.

Overview

• Contributions will have real releases and version strings, just like Drupal core itself
• Security announcements will refer to exact versions of modules that are effected
• Issues will be tracked by the exact version number of the contribution where the bug is present
• Development branches for any given version of the Drupal core -- maintainers can add new features to their module or theme without endangering the stability of other code that is compatible with the same version of Drupal core.
• All contributions will be clearly identified with the version of Drupal core they are compatible with

For the rest of the proposal, please see the full post on drupal.org.

I'm thinking about a database which is storing:
- Project name
- Download file
- Module name
- Date
- MD5 and SHA1
- Module description
- Drupal Version
- README.TXT or INSTALL.TXT
and programming an interface (module) to check these against your own installation.

What I need is to download all "[PROJECT].tar.gz" files and import these into a database. This was the easy job (simple devel example).
Currently this is done with a CCK designed table, but I will switch to an own node-type cause of some CCK restrictions (e.g. search).

the next two steps are writing:

Project intial code released.

Code contains:

imagemagick2.inc (contains the library wrapper of imagemagick)

--> integrated with image.module (Another Image Handling toolkit)

Link to the project: http://drupal.org/project/imagemagick

Caveat: I used an old version of the project module so I'm not sure if some of these are still relevant. Others may take off from this document. (i borrowed the template from Robert -- thanks!)

Project Description:

Improve Drupal's Project Module.

Motivation:

Drupal has a project module that provides basic functionality for tracking projects. However, this needs improvement. Improving the usability and usefulness of the Project Module will make it a more robust project management tool and increase/attract more users to Drupal :-).

Success criteria:

The project will be considered successful if the following features are done: