A while ago I registered http://drupal.org/project/countries with the intent to create a module that retrieves country list from an authoritative API (my intention is to use World Bank API which uses UN list, since UN does not seem to have its own API for this).

Unfortunately, and I have to apologize for it, I did not get to work on it for a while. It was a combination of me not finding time and some challenges with the bank API (initially you were not allowed to cache data and you had to get an API key). Bank's APi has removed these barriers since then and I got some time to work on it.

Today, I finally sat down to work on the module, but immediately ran into several problems:

1. Seems like project has been unpublished? I still see it but anonymous users do not. Looks like somebody reported the project to webmaster's issue queue at some point. Not sure, i was never notified about it.

2. Furthermore, when I initialized /contributions/modules/countries folder in CVS (which happened without any errors) and then updated from CVS suddenly a whole bunch of code appeared under that folder. Looks like somebody has created an entire module in that location. That module has some country-related functionality, but retrieves country list form a CSV file rather than an authoritative web-service. I just contacted the person whose CVS ID was on the files, so hopefully when he gets back to me, it will shed some light on how this happened, but right now it's a little unclear how this could have happened.

In any case, looks like the project is in a disarray right now, so I would appreciate some help to get it back on track.

Maybe republish it for starters?

Thank you.

Comments

damien tournoud’s picture

damien tournoud commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

See #394006: Reopen and reassign Countries project for background. It seems that there is no room for another countries module. Please collaborate with the maintainers of http://drupal.org/project/countries_api

irakli’s picture

irakli commented
Status: Closed (won't fix) » Active

Thank you for the quick response, Damien.

Actually, it seems like the stated reason was: "the other project didn't have any code, so I unpublished it." and not that the two projects are duplicates.

There's no problem collaborating and maybe merging modules, in the future, but for now - these are not the same modules. Countries module is trying to connect to third-party service, whereas countries_api is providing an API for converting between full name, ISO2, ISO3.

These modules may be complementary, but not duplicates.

I would respectfully urge to re-consider.

Also, it is still unclear how and why did the existing code appear under /contributions/modules/countries. I thought you could not commit to a module if you were not a maintainer of the module.

Thank you.

qler’s picture

qler commented

@Damien,

I don't think the current maintainer of the module you suggested is all that open to collaboration. Looking at node 394006, I can see he's already received an awesome idea and code but didn't seem too interested in it. He also hasn't updated his project in 20 weeks. Makes me sad about open source. If people don't want to collaborate, at least let the fresh new ideas get implemented in separate modules.

Since a different implementation is needed, maybe the Countries API is not really a real API afterall, and I see that irakli and Alan should collaborate on a different version for those of us in the community who're interested in it. Please keep me posted on this, because the idea proposed by Alan in the other thread sounded good and had a lot of work already put into it already. I'm not sure why the few of you get to decide what we the rest of the community get to use. Are you trying to turn Drupal into Microsoft or something?

irakli’s picture

irakli commented

@qler,

I am sure you had the best of the intentions, but I think your message may be a little unfair to Damien. I do not think he is trying to be a ruthless dictator here :) Some diligence is necessary to make sure Drupal does not get spammed by thousands of nonsense and duplicated/forked projects.

It's always a balance between fighting that threat and also allowing enough freedom to not kill new efforts before they are born. The two often seem conflicting but you have to balance, otherwise such large community effort won't work.

I am sure we will find a solution.

If webmasters agree, I think right now the best solution would be to republish the project with Alan's code as the starting point, I will add a connection to the World Bank API, which was the initial intention of the module, anyway and then we can see if merging with Countries API is feasible and how we can achieve it.

avpaderno’s picture

avpaderno
he/him
Primary language Italian
Location Brescia, 🇮🇹 🇪🇺
commented

See also #394006: Reopen and reassign Countries project.
Both the reports are asking to re-publish the same project; therefore, one is a duplicate of the other. It should be better to follow just a single report, rather than answering to both.

qler’s picture

qler commented

@irakli, By the way, do you currently develop on github or the like? If you don't mind opening the code, I'd appreciate following it there until it gets released here. Thank you for your work.

irakli’s picture

irakli commented

@qler,

yeah, but I feel strongly that Drupal code should be on drupal.org to not spread it all over the Web, so I would rather wait a little more to see if the project will be re-opened.

Thank you.

alan d.’s picture

alan d. commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

I've got the countries module in production, and at this stage it is the planned successor to both cck_country and countries_api, albeit something could turn up that changes this.

I am more than happy to look at any additional ideas for the module if you still are interested / have the need for additional features. Patches are even more welcome!!!

Please feel free to post them into the countries module queue, http://drupal.org/project/issues/countries.