Joomla core developer? I don't know whether to be flattered or
insulted....
I'd argue that they are no harder to cope with than the solution that
your proposing here, especially if they try to install a single other
module into their drupal installation, and discover that yours is the
only module that follows this paradigm. (Please download the 7.2
module for your fixes.... yes I know you're running 6.x but that's
where the code is, trust me.)
I wouldn't have chimed in if I hadn't written a ton of deployment
scripts and systems. Really, deployment strategies are best if they
are as loosely coupled as possible from the code base. IMHO, if
you're going to start asking about how to make this work and it
conflicts with the dependency management system in drupal, you're
barkin up the wrong tree. This will be the first thing that breaks
as you say in drupal api revisions. You're still going to have to
write code that instrospects drupal to figure out what version it is
and then load different code based on this. This is seriously going
to obfuscate your contrib module, not to mention complicate your
repository (the version 7.x.4 branch of the 6.x.3 module etc. )
I really do believe what your talking about will be harder to
implement than a drupal specific packaging script over the long haul,
or I wouldn't have chimed in.
Just to set the record straight.... I'm a contrib developer, not a
core developer and deal with the api changes all the time.
Dave
36 PM, Rob Thorne wrote:
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
