Decisions project description:

Decisions is a replacement for poll.module and provides advanced voting systems and decision-making tools. It aims to enable groups to take decisions online in a manner that replicates and augments what is possible in face-to-face meeting.

  • Voting systems: Basic polls, Approval Voting, Borda Count, and Instant-Runoff Voting.
  • Vote management: view each user's vote, delete all votes, or restrict the poll to a list of users.
  • Time management: schedule when to open or close the poll, and choose when to show results.

    • Decisions depends on VotingAPI.

Advanced Poll project description:

Advanced Poll is a replacement to Drupal's poll module and provides multiple voting systems, decision-making tools, and management options.

  • Voting systems: Basic polls, Approval Voting, Borda Count, and Instant-Runoff Voting.
  • Vote management: view each user's vote, delete all votes, or restrict the poll to a list of users.
  • Time management: schedule when to open or close the poll, and choose when to show results.
  • Choice management: write-in choices, and support for HTML (or other input filter).
  • Usability: fast Ajax interaction and customizable default settings. Drag-and-drop for ranked votes in Drupal 6.
  • Migration: convert regular Drupal polls into Advanced Polls.

Dependencies: Voting API.

Optional: jQuery Update.

Seems like significant overlap. Rather than copying features, why not work together to build a kick a$$ module.

See: Why you should work together!

Comments

philbar’s picture

philbar commented

Issue at Advanced Poll: #481360: Combine Forces with Decisions

philbar’s picture

philbar commented

Usage Statistics

Decisions
5.x - 22
6.x - 162
Total - 184

Advanced Poll
5.x - 578
6.x - 532
Total - 1,110

As of May 24th.

Seems like the obvious choice is to depreciate Decisions in favor of Advanced Poll.

tstoeckler’s picture

tstoeckler
he/him
Primary language German
Location Essen, Germany
commented

From the project description it seems all of Decision's functionality is covered by advanced poll, so the next step would be to figure out exactly what decisions does, that adv. poll doesn't.

philbar’s picture

philbar commented

From what I gathered from the following issue, dated December 2006, Advanced Poll is a fork of Decisions.

#101622: What's The Relationship/Difference Between Decisions and Advanced Poll?

philbar’s picture

philbar commented

Advanced Poll started October 28, 2006 (Determined from CVS messages).

The last Feature Request fixed in Decisions before that date was actually fixed by Advanced Poll's maintainer, ChrisKennedy:
#89741: Option to view who voted for what on a Decision

This means the following list are Feature Request which might not be included in Advanced Poll (Determined by Search).

#83040: Implement uninstall hook for Drupal 5.0
#92141: Quorum
#91492: Should decision nodes have a body?
#92142: Allow anonymous users to vote
#88217: More precise closing date by defining a start date.
#89169: Reset votes

Let's assume Bugs, Tasks, and Support Request issues are not needed to be considered in depreciating Decisions.

tstoeckler’s picture

tstoeckler
he/him
Primary language German
Location Essen, Germany
commented

That is assuming, though, that the developers documented every code change in an issue. Would be helpful to have one of them comment this first hand.

bgm’s picture

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

IIRC, Advpoll is a fork of Decisions, when the developement on Decisions slowed down at some point. With time, both modules took on different architectures.

From what I've followed, they did try to re-merge the modules, but it never worked out. Both modules are not actively developed. They are sort of maintained, but there is plenty of room for improvements.

(Disclaimer: I work for Koumbit, which has sponsored part of the development on Decisions, but I'm not a maintainer of the module)

matt

philbar’s picture

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

What are the main architecture difference?

Two things should happen with this issue:
a) The modules merge.
b) The modules are clear distinguished with comparison of differences.

Right now, Drupal users cannot determine why they should use Decisions over Advanced Polls. This is a problem!

Even developers haven't mentioned why the modules are different. As far as I know, there is no compelling reason to choose one over the other. This is why I feel it is best to merge the projects and stop wasting energy reinventing the wheel.

Can you make a case for why the should remain two distinct projects?

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

This thread may prove helpful in this discussion http://drupal.org/node/197093

gugki’s picture

gugki commented

oh wow, that's like kindergarden...
unbelievable but ok, I also know some developers...

so this means that currently for D6 decision is the less buggy module.
why is it still v0.1 beta. looks like very early dev stage...

thx

anarcat’s picture

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

So yeah, sorry about this mess. I understand how you guys must be feeling, but this is the reality we need to deal with at this point. I think that both Chris and us are stretched pretty thin at this point which makes both modules less maintained that they should really be and for that I apologize. I feel this could have all been avoided, but it's all in the past now. I have offered my help to Chris to start with decisions again and welcome him in the project regardless of the fork, instead of porting advpoll to Drupal6, and he prefered to go his own way.

As for the architectural differences, the only one I can think of right now is the fact that decisions tries to model decisions making as hookable modules, while all this is glued together in advpoll. I also think the database structure diverged at some point.

So that's it: unless things get really bad in the future, we'll keep on developing and using decisions. Note that we also tried and used advpoll on a few occasions, it's a great module too, but unfortunately, it seems the different between our Chris and Koumbit are not reconcilable (which I don't really understand). All help in decisions is welcome at any time, and while we are sometimes slow to respond, we'll gladly give CVS access to people that demonstrate the skills in the trackers.

Thank you for your interest in Decisions.