David Metzler wrote:
I think this would be best solved with install scripts provided with
the external softward product (e.g. CiviRM) . That is the third party
product comes with both distros of the contrib module. That
packaging /install script might event be able to get away with reading
the .info files of a core module to determine the correct version to
install, but then would install the right version based on the
detected drupal version. In fact I'd be willing to bet that you'd
find the install scripts easier to implement than what you're puposing
here :).
Spoken kinda like a Joomla core person, ironically enough. Eeek. You
know not what you ask. That's a serious burden on another project,
since those kinds of solutions are hard to engineer, and they tend to
hard for end users to cope with as well.
Sometimes, it's worth following The Golden Rule when dealing with other
developer communities. While the Drupal community has gotten fairly
adept at dealing with breaking compatibility every year or so, it can be
make it hard for other projects to deal with us.
The best approach (one that we generally follow with in this project)
makes most things self configuring. I don't think it would be all that
hard to accommodate this -- and perhaps we do: I'll have to experiment
with Drupal 6 and Drupal 7. But if we don't, we arguably should. Not
all projects can or will distribute their Drupal modules via Drupal.org,
and not all projects will choose to deploy only via Drupal. We may not
need or want to make it all that easy. But I don't think we need or
want to make it harder than it needs to be either.
Rob
I agree that even if its possible its not sustainable.
I frankly don't think version control systems will solve this problem
for you since you're talking about a distribution problem and not a
code management problem.
Dave
On Feb 16, 2010, at 10:31 AM, Rob Thorne wrote:
There are a couple of large software projects that are designed to
install together with Drupal (CiviCRM is one of them). Typically, a
project like this distributes a Drupal module that handles the
embedding of the project inside of a Drupal install.
Is it even possible for a project like this to distribute either:
1. Both a Drupal 6 *and* a Drupal 7 module (i.e., will Drupal look at
the .info files and ignore the "wrong" version), or
2. A single Drupal module that keeps its Drupal-version specific
features (changed, new or dropped API calls, hooks with
incompatible call signatures, etc.) in .inc files and loads them
dynamically?
This is not "the done thing", and the module upgrade instructions in
the handbook show it would be pretty daunting to do for anything but
a trivial module. But is it even possible?
Rob Thorne
Torenware Networks
