I use feeds quite a bit and have a several years of module development experience. I maintain the ldap module for drupal 7. My initial interest is in getting the RTBC stuff in. Being in an alpha state and not having RTBC stuff committed present participation issues for developers.
I see some phase II commits back in march and some dave reid commits. If dave reid had committed to anything more than "...to be able to casually review issues in the queue and help provide fixes to bugs", I would not consider this module abandoned. See #1066286: Application to add Dave Reid as a co-maintainer (is Feeds actively maintained?)
As it is, it seems abandoned, but heavily used.
Part of the problem is the RTBC patches that don't have tests with them. Another part is no feedback on which features and patches belong in a 7.x-2.0 Release Candidate. I can help in both areas. The first by writing unit tests. The second by pushing a dialog on scope of 7.x-2.0.
My thoughts on a release candidate are generally keep it simple #1301678: Release Path and Roadmap for Feeds 7.x-2.0 and well backed by simpletests. Keep contrib module integration in other contrib modules as everyone seems to agree on.
Comments
Comment #1
twistor commentedI'm curious to see how this goes.
Comment #2
johnbarclay commentedMoving this to the webmaster queue for the next step in the adandoned module process. (http://drupal.org/node/251466).
The feeds module is at http://drupal.org/project/feeds and I'm offering to maintain it. I've contacted the maintainer through the contact form and have not heard back. The module is quite heavily used, the drupal 7 version has yet to leave the alpha state, and there are a ton of RTBC patches in queue. So the sooner I can get at it the better. Thanks.
Comment #3
micheMoving to the correct queue per comment above.
Comment #4
dave reidfebbaro is responsive to being contacted via the contact form. Did you attempt to mail him (edit: looks like you did)? I know he and the phase2 team would probably object to the module being transferred away. It's not like they've completely disappeared, so I'm willing to give them a benefit of a doubt.
Unit tests don't depend on a new maintainer and can be done by anyone. I would probably be ok committing more things if they had unit tests to back them up but no one ever has them with their patches.
Comment #5
dave reidIt has not yet been two weeks since Nov 21 either. Two weeks from Nov 21 would be Dec 5.
Comment #6
johnbarclay commentedThis module needs a kick in the butt. It needs leadership and direction. A clear plan of what the 7.x-2.x should have in it and not in it. And a presence in the issue queue. Otherwise feeds module adopters and contributors have no idea what is going on. I can't provide any of this without a maintainer role. The existing simpletests for the module itself don't work, making it difficult to write additional ones.
I suspect the state of the module is embarrassing to phase II and they will be happy to give up maintainership. They don't even have their name on it as a sponsor. If they wanted to maintain it, they would be doing so.
Its a well architected module, it just looks like they have lost interest in it.
Comment #7
dave reidNot going to disagree with a lack of direction and leadership. I'll write Frank an e-mail as well expressing a critical need for some kind of action from Phase 2 on direction or action. Hopefully either one of us will hear back soon.
I've actually put in a lot of effort into actually making some sense of the simpletests as they were written and getting them into a mostly passing state (at least for D7). The D7 branch is only 15 fails and 6 exceptions away from 100% pass. The simple tests weren't even able to run on qa.drupal.org until recently when contrib dependencies were included with tests.
Comment #8
twistor commentedComment #9
damienmckennaThis is an important module, some active participation by Phase2 and/or granting johnbarclay comaintainership would do the community a world of good.
Comment #10
Anonymous (not verified) commentedWe have just added a few more co-maintainers to the Feeds module (as in the past two weeks), so we are definitely not looking to give up ownership. I will make sure to bring up your concerns to our maintainers and co-maintainers so that we can get some movement going on this for you.
Comment #11
johnbarclay commentedLet me know where I fit in. I'm still unclear where corporate personhood fits into the drupal community. It almost seems like the discussion of who maintains the module and its direction are taking place at phase II rather than the drupal community and issue queue; this works against building the drupal community and open source software in general. My understanding is that the module ownership is by an individual drupal user. More than one drupal user may maintain them. Of course, I'm rather naive on the politics of all this.
Comment #12
Anonymous (not verified) commented@johnbarclay, you asked for direction and leadership and we're trying to start somewhere. We are in no way trying to hold the module as only our own and are more than happy to get help from the community. However, I think it's important that this conversation happens with the current maintainers and co-maintainers, so they can work with all of you, which is why I said I was going to talk to them about it.
Comment #13
giorgio79 commentedGo @johnbarclay, the last commit from current maintainers was in August, and there never was a stable release either for 6x and 7x, it was always either alpha, beta or dev...
@Danielle Sheffler "We have just added a few more co-maintainers to the Feeds module", I hope @johnbarclay was one of them... :)
Comment #14
petednz commentedanyone able to post some good New Year news on this?
Comment #15
johnbarclay commentedSee #1301678: Release Path and Roadmap for Feeds 7.x-2.0 for any follow up on the status of the 7.x-2.x version of the module. This application/thread is closed.