Move Image assist from Other to Image package

I agree that it would be nice to have Image assist appear below "Image". In fact, that was the way we did it at first in the Drupal 5 port. However, it was agreed not to assign it to "Image" because the idea behind those "categories", or "packages" as they're actually called, is to group modules that belong to just that, a package. The "Image" package exists because there are three modules distributed with the Image module, thus forming a package. Image assist is not actually part of a package in that sense, but one might argue that it should belong to "Image" anyway, since it's unusable without the Image module.

This is what seems to be the consensus on the development mailing list (webchick's words):

Modules that extend a particular "parent" module, such as CCK, Views, Organic Groups, etc. use the "parent" module's name as the package. I think you'd use this when your module would basically be completely useless on its own without said parent module.

And the handbook says:

If you assign a package string for your module, on the admin/build/modules page it will be listed with other modules with the same category. If you do not assign one, it will simply be listed as 'Other'. Not assigning a package for your module is perfectly ok; in general packages are best used for modules that are distributed together or are meant to be used together. If you have any doubt, leave this field blank.

Suggested examples of appropriate items for the package field:

• Audio
• Bot
• CCK
• Chat
• E-Commerce
• Event
• Feed Parser
• Organic groups
• Station
• Video
• Views
• Voting (if it uses/requires VotingAPI)

So, I'd say we could probably use the Image package after all. Any objections?

We went through this in regards to the taxonomy list module. The final verdict was (after a lot of back and forth with the developer mailing list) that a package should only be assigned when it's a real package, not to group modules that depend on other packages. See #101980 and the developer mailing list, circa December 20th.

> experience if the user has more than a handful of "Other" modules.
> Shouldn't the user see a grouping for Taxonomy for all of the modules
> dealing with Taxonomy?

No, because that is a category. That is not a package. Please see the
archives of the development list for an already extensive discussion of
this, specifically my own message here, which inspired this docs:

http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2006-November/021080.html

It's a tricky question. I don't think the consensus is really that solid even among core developers, except that everyone agrees that Packages are not Categories.

In the case of Image assist I think it really wouldn't be that big a deal to assign it to Image since that package already exists. This is really a sub-module to Image, don't you think? The Taxonomy case is different in my mind at least because it's such a huge concept which applies to so many different things.

If you take CCK, which everyone seems to agree is a valid package, it consists of both the modules that are distributed with the main project (e.g. the Content and Text modules) as well as contributed modules (e.g. Imagefield) that use the same foundation but belong to a different project. Doesn't the same apply to Image, Image gallery and Image attach on the one hand and Image assist on the other?

@moonray: I think you probably agree with this, except maybe it's not 100% in line with what some people think. I don't think there is a policy that stops us from doing this however – Dries said in an email to the dev list that he doesn't want to have too strict rules about packages. I think that handbook text is as close as we'll get to an official policy.

If you feel comfortable with it, I would say go for it. Just keep in mind that there was some talk of revamping the modules page to allow for categories in addition to packages. That wouldn't happen until drupal 6, though.

It makes sense for image assist to be part of the image package, in my book. :-)

If we do this, then there would have to be an Image assist package. Maybe we should wait for a while and see what happens.

Hm, it seems that this module was already moved to Image in this commit on February 20th – six days before this issue was created. Well, it was nice discussing it anyway... :)