By Bèr Kessels on

Contributers to drupal might remember that last release the contribution module was cleaned up after a new release.

The plans are to do this again after the new 4.5 release. The last time there was some confusion about why and how this would be done so if you are a contribution maintainer, or are looking for a way to help Drupal, read this carefully.

Because we allow everyone with good modules or themes, to keep those in the contributions, these are not always up to date. After a new release, modules or themes are often not updated, simply because there is no-one to do so. This is confusing, people try to install old modules quite often, resulting in errors, or a non working site. Also, for a lot of people it is not clear that a module is not maintained, so they might not see that there is a great opportunity to help! And because Drupal does not work with backwards compatible releases, old modules will most certainly not work on a new release without modification. For content we do have backwards compatibility, of course.

Contributions will be removed if:

  • they do not have a HEAD branch (i.e. those that are created for a single release only).
  • they are more that two releases old
  • they were not updated for two releases

Note that removing does not throw them away for good. They will still be accessible in the attic of the repository.

This means for the 4.5 release, that there will be list compiled with old contributions that are pending for removal. Kjartan keeps such a list on his site. If you see a module there, or in the CVS attic, that you like to adopt, find out how to help. If you are the maintainer of a module in that list, feel free to reopen your modules and repair them for a new release.

Comments

Dries’s picture

Dries commented

In addition, it is worth noting that Drupal 4.5.0's new features might deprecate modules that have been maintained properly. These need to be dealt with as well. Possible candidates are amongst the upload modules (upload.module, attachment.module, attachment_node.module, node_image.module, etc.) and the various menu-related modules (menus.module, taxonomy_menus.module, taxnav.module, navlinks.module, etc.). If you maintain such module, and you think it can be deleted from HEAD (and DRUPAL-4-5), please do so.

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

We should also investigate if the projects listed here at drupal.org do fullfil the conditions to remain listed on the contrib page. Yesterday the gallery project was removed because it only was released for 4.1. other old modules might also need to be removed.

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If you have troubles with a particular contrib project, please consider to file a support request. Thanks.

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