Poll

There is much talk about having a roadmap at Drupal.org but Dries is against this because it may take away the chaotic development.

If you are familiar with opensource software developement then you know that there is are two types of projects as designated by someone in a book on the subject. Eric Raymond classifies them as the "Cathedral and Bazaar".

Dries seems to think that Drupal is best run as a Bazaar. I don't agree with this entirely. When Drupal was a small application with a few students using it then a chaotic melee of coding may have been the reason for it's popularity and growth. People dumping what they knew and could deliver. But now as things have changed considerably with business and thousands of users depending on an ever growing code base there needs to be more order. Other php projects have shown this time after time. Drupal has matured and needs to start showing this in it's community structure as well as the code.

Sooner or later the development structure has to grow up and start being reponsible. With this responsiblility comes a need to satisfy the user group with low hanging fruit. In the case of Drupal this fruit should be a roadmap with one or two simple promises that can be kept. But they don't really have to be. After all ezPublish and Typo3 have good roadmaps and only have delivered on parts of them within the timeframe set. Yet the users are not jumping ship because the roadmap and it's promises are not being kept. People are strange in that they want to be informed and up to date even when the information involved is not concrete. Web developers and programmers have a tendancy to be too strict in giving those that are "just users" ideas about what is happening inside the code.

I like roadmaps just because they make good reading when I am interested in a project. I even have added my name to one or two. Being on the roadmap kept me on the road to my goal and although I took a different road my destination is still the same.

So what are the things you would like to see on a Drupal roadmap?

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