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Drupal 8 Development Begins — 15 Bugs At a Time

darthcamaro writes "It took nearly 3 years for the open source Drupal 7 content management system to hit general availability. The plan for pushing out Drupal 8 is to be faster. How are they going to do that? '"At no point in time will there be more than 15 critical bugs," Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal said. "I will not pull in a big change if we know there are known bugs. This gives us the ability to do timely releases because we know at most the release is only 15 critical bugs away from being ready."'"

56 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. brilliant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    why don't microsoft decide that there are only 15 critical bugs left in windows 8 and release it next week?

  2. I can beat that by lintmint · · Score: 1

    Let there be no critical bugs. That was easy!

  3. go faster by going slower? by sparetiredesire · · Score: 3, Informative

    Two bad side effects may be:

    - Less merging (which will slow progress)
    - More critical bugs triaged as non-critical to avoid blocking releases.

    I like the Chrome team's ideas to have multiple branches, only do merges in one direction (towards more stable branches), and making features easily removable so they can be nuked if they are not stable enough to make a release. I'm not sure of a clean way to do the easy code disabling with PHP.

    http://goo.gl/G2uDn

      In general, though, more merging is better than less merging. It will be interesting to see how this pans out for Drupal.

    1. Re:go faster by going slower? by furbearntrout · · Score: 1

      My mommy says I'm special!

      --
      Crap. What did the new CSS do with the "Post anonymously" option??
    2. Re:go faster by going slower? by icebraining · · Score: 1

      If you implement the features as plugins/modules, they can easily be disabled. This isn't specific to any language, although OOP languages have some well known patterns that can be implemented easily.

    3. Re:go faster by going slower? by NightHwk1 · · Score: 1

      They would get a lot more done when they finish their transition over to Git (although they should seriously consider Github instead of whatever custom thing they're building). I've had things to contribute, mostly bugfixes for modules, but the whole community is still stuck on CVS and patch files, so it was too much of a pain to do.

  4. So... by msauve · · Score: 1

    They're calling 7.1, 8.

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    1. Re:So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Correcting an attempt at funny or sarcastic with facts = whoosh, no?

    2. Re:So... by kuzb · · Score: 1

      I was under the impression he was correcting stupid, since it wasn't actually funny.

      --
      BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
  5. 15 bug limit by pellik · · Score: 2

    Because I always know about all of my bugs and keep track of them while I'm programming. In fact I sometimes even plan them ahead of time.

    1. Re:15 bug limit by bigsexyjoe · · Score: 1

      Of course! I actually think he should go further and say at no point will the team inject the critical bugs in the first place.

    2. Re:15 bug limit by TheCoders · · Score: 1

      No really, we only have fifteen bugs! Trust us...

      At one company I used to work at, we had a "last bug award." Every once in a while, somebody would claim to have fixed the "last bug" in a section of the software. They were treated to a round of ridicule, plus the award token (some kind of stuffed animal, if I recall), until someone else was foolish enough to make the same claim.

  6. Re:Drupal hungry. News at 11. Drupal loves papa. by inpher · · Score: 1

    Don't worry. We will soon resume the normal Apple & Google schedule. Can't have enough of those though!

  7. Awesome! by /dev/trash · · Score: 5, Informative

    This was like when they said that once there were no more critical bugs 6 and then 7 would be released. Which is what happened. They moved the level down to major and voila! No more critical bugs.

    Now, a few days after 7 was released, 7 criticals appeared. 2 were new. The others? Just old bugs that could be bumped up again.

    1. Re:Awesome! by hansamurai · · Score: 2

      Maybe it's all about context? They weren't critical in the fact that they were stopping the release, but they're critical now that the general release is out, features are done, and this is what needs to be worked on now.

      I'm sticking with Drupal 6, modules are what makes Drupal so great and until everything is ported or there's something equivalent available... not bothering.

    2. Re:Awesome! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      I've used Drupal 7 on some simple sites and it's sweet. There's a bit more debugging going into unknown territory, but it's worth the trade-offs if you're comfortable with Drupal and know beforehand what you can/cannot do in D7 yet. Some D7 modules are still waiting for a final release, like Relations, Media module, Internationalization and Drupal Commerce, but most are usable, and they're going to be kick-ass when they reach a final release.

      Yay Droopal

    3. Re:Awesome! by cyphercell · · Score: 1

      That's my sock puppet right there.

      --
      Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
    4. Re:Awesome! by cyphercell · · Score: 1

      I wasn't a developer on Drupal, but in 5 you could setup developer, editor, writer, reader, publisher, as different users and the ACLs with basic Drupal. You can use Drupal as code to manage your own php and most likely have ported that over rather than relying on modules. I was also just noticing the other day that, that's what kernel trap is running, so it can't be that bad.

      --
      Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
    5. Re:Awesome! by wrook · · Score: 1

      The thing is that bugs are not really different than new functionality. The only real difference is expectation. With a bug, somebody (somewhere) expected the software to already work in a certain way, and it doesn't. With new functionality, there is no expectation that it already works that way.

      My own personal opinion is that all work should be organised the same way. It should be ordered by priority and tackled with the top priority issue first (whether or not you already expect the software to work that way). The whole idea that you will stop adding critical new work until you have some arbitrary amount of "I thought this already worked" stuff left is kind of strange.

      Similarly, there is always a lack of functionality in a piece of software. There may be an expectation that it works in a certain way, but that is not a reason in and of itself to delay a release. You release when the software does what you need it to do for that release. The expectation is mostly irrelevant. So, for instance, a user may say, "Oh, I thought that was supposed to work/not crash/etc. But it doesn't matter because I don't need it". That's totally OK. But if the user says, "I need it to do X, and it doesn't", it is irrelevant if they originally expected it to work. They still can't do what they need to do.

      From a development process, bugs are useful because they point to a breakdown in process. Why is there an expectation that the software does something, when in fact it doesn't do it? But confusing this with release planning is rather stupid IMHO.

    6. Re:Awesome! by wrook · · Score: 1

      I'm bad today, replying to my own post.

      Just had the typical image of a software team that doesn't actually know all of the requirements of the software until after it gets shipped off to QA/Beta test. Then a whole raft of "bugs" come back indicating what the requirements should actually be. But because they are labelled as "bugs", there is an implied expectation that the software already should work that way. The priorities are then set by the QA team rather than the design team and the release is delayed until the QA team gets the requirements it wants fulfilled.

      Yes, there are better ways to do software development...

    7. Re:Awesome! by turbidostato · · Score: 1

      "It should be ordered by priority and tackled with the top priority issue first (whether or not you already expect the software to work that way). The whole idea that you will stop adding critical new work until you have some arbitrary amount of "I thought this already worked" stuff left is kind of strange."

      I think you have a point. This way, *any* software, no matter how complex it might be would be ready to release within hours:

      Functionality #1: print "hello, world"
      Functionality #2: print "hello, world"
      Functionality #3: print "hello, world"

      There, done. Maybe you had a different expectation about how F #1 to #3 should work, maybe even because I, the developer, told that F #1 to #3 were due to work in a different way but, hey, that makes no difference, does it?

      The fact is that there *is* a difference between something not being there and something expected to be there working in a different way than expected.

      "Similarly, there is always a lack of functionality in a piece of software. There may be an expectation that it works in a certain way, but that is not a reason in and of itself to delay a release"

      There is exactly the same reason to delay a release because functionality X, which is a landmark for the release not being there, and then more since "working as it's said to be working" is a landmark for each and every release.

      "Why is there an expectation that the software does something, when in fact it doesn't do it?"

      You aren't seriously saying that, are you?

    8. Re:Awesome! by Shimmer · · Score: 1

      My old boss wanted to start a software project with a single bug called "Nothing works yet". The dev team then would, in theory, then go to work "fixing" this problem, which would lead to new "bugs" with slightly more detail in them. Rinse, repeat.

      We assumed he was joking and ignored him.

      --
      The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
    9. Re:Awesome! by Idimmu+Xul · · Score: 1

      I'm sticking with Drupal 6, modules are what makes Drupal so great and until everything is ported or there's something equivalent available... not bothering.

      I've just ported a project from 7 to 6 for exactly this reason, core might be stable but loads of modules, including gmap, calendar, date are all screwed up in some way.

      --
      The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
    10. Re:Awesome! by silanea · · Score: 1

      I am not so sure this is a universally bad idea. Ubuntu does something similar which, while of course being irrelevant for the software itself, sets a certain goal or mindset for the project. When writing a software for a non-profit we filed "x does not like it" (with x being the least, ahem, mentally flexible and most problematic user in the organisation) as first bug and marked it as release blocker. So in order to get the software out to the users we were forced to interact with the "worst" of them and really reflect on this person's feedback, which resulted in an application that everyone actually wanted to use.

      For a big commercial product such a nontechnical bug may be unproductive, but for the right team it may actually add a motivation or direct focus at something that usually would be an afterthought at best.

      --
      Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
    11. Re:Awesome! by Mouldy · · Score: 1

      Modules is why I think this is a bad idea. During the 3 years that Drupal 6 was the latest-and-greatest, a lot of great modules were developed for it. If 7 has a shorter amount of time as the latest-and-greatest, it follows that there will be less amazing modules for it.

      If they're going to speed up the release cycle, they should maintain compatibility with older modules. Otherwise, we're just going to end up with lots of versions of vanilla drupal (which in itself, is quite bland) and not many modules that make it as powerful as Drupal 6.

  8. No one by JustOK · · Score: 2

    No one needs more than 15 critical bugs.

    --
    rewriting history since 2109
  9. Re:Drupal hungry. News at 11. Drupal loves papa. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is the 5th drupal psuedo-story in the duration of a month ?
    REALLY ?

    And on EVERY ONE OF THEM, unity100 whines about it and slips in more links to his pet framework that nobody uses.

  10. scary by nethenson · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I will not pull in a big change if we know there are known bugs.

    At no point in time will there be more than 15 critical bugs

    I find that differentiation between 'bugs' and 'known bugs' scary (to say the least).

    Does he mean that there will be no more than 15 critical bugs (whether known or unknown)? Or, does he mean that all bugs are always known (and that when the 15 errors mark is reached, one simply has to stop writing new code to keep on that mark -since undetected bugs don't exist-?)

    In any case, it is very naïve. Naïve and frightening.

    1. Re:scary by Crouty · · Score: 1

      He means "no more than 15 known bugs", of course. (How could you guess wrong twice?)

      Dries' wording was unfortunate (he is Belgian ;-) ) but I can assure you he knows the difference between known, unknown and critical bugs very well.

      --
      On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
  11. Re:Blind leading the blind by tomhudson · · Score: 1

    Good luck getting it down to 15...

    That's easy.

    1. select count(*) from bugstore where bug_level='critical';
    2. 2914 rows selected
    3. update bugstore set bug_level=non_critical where bug_level='critical' limit 2900;
    4. "select count(*) from bugstore where bug_level='critical';
    5. 14 rows selected

    Okay, I'm joking, but you get the idea. It's like the lawyer who said he didn't care if the customer negotiated his hourly rate down, as long as HE controlled the clock.

  12. A little slack? by steve317 · · Score: 1

    Oh, come on, guys, give them a break. I watched Dries' keynote address streamed online in which he made this declaration. The point is it's a standard, a declaration of intent. He essentially expressed regret at the unexpected quagmire of the 3-year dev cycle for v7 that was caused by accepting component builds with a sum total of hundreds of *known* bugs. So, now, the aspiration and protocol is to not accept new builds of core pieces if they can find more than 15 total bugs among them. How is that any different or worse than any other policy statement. They're not saying they will cure a different genetic disorder with each new build. And I guess the assumption can be that they are prioritizing the stability level of the status quo build over new bells, whistles, or expansion. I'm as frustrated as anyone about the many challenges a developer faces getting all the parts of a f*ing Drupal site to all work at once and reliably, but version 7 leaves a lot of the chaos behind it, and the 15-bug rule for version 8 is an applaudable new policy to continue in this more modern and stable direction.

  13. Re:How about 0 critical bugs? by winomonkey · · Score: 1

    Reading comprehension fail. Dries is saying that they will not develop new features if they have 15 critical bugs - they will keep the count beneath the stated number. They are doing this so that "at most the release is only 15 critical bugs away from being ready" ... the basic premise of this statement is that the release will not be ready until the 15 critical bugs are resolved.

    The new features are more important than bug free code.

    What was stated in the article is the exact inverse of the problem you are claiming. They are stating that they will stop new feature development if there are more than 15 critical bugs. Their statement is about bug-free code being more important than new features.

  14. Understanding the Drupal development process by Crouty · · Score: 1
    Some of the people posting sarcastic comments fail to understand the development process of Drupal. The very core of Drupal is lean - but useless. And then there are modules to add functionality like blogging features, XML-sitemap for search engines or a system that lets you create custom content types. Some of these modules that are useful for most potential users become part of Drupal. These are called "core modules", the rest "contributed modules". What Dries probably meant was to tighten the requirements for a module to go into core, i.e. a buggy module must be fixed before the release maintainer can consider it going into core.

    This is just a tweak in Drupal's lifecycle model with the aim to be more agile. It means that new features will be available sooner for novice users. For Drupal pros there will be no change because they install their favorite collection of modules anyway.

    --
    On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
    1. Re:Understanding the Drupal development process by Curunir_wolf · · Score: 1

      That's not the way I see it. I've worked with Drupal for some time, and I think the problem he's trying to solve here is to get the development community a little more focused on the boring stuff that really needs work, rather than their own little world of modules and the patches for those modules. This happens a lot - there's a critical bug that needs to be fixed, and it's blocking not just a release, but also several patches with new features that are required by various modules. That means that critical but is holding up a *lot* of work. But often it's a boring problem, or the core maintainers are so swamped with stuff they don't have time for it.

      I think Dries is hoping that by rejecting more stuff when there are critical bugs to work on in the core that it will motivate more developers to divert additional time to getting those bugs fixed.

      --
      "Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
      --- Jerry Garcia
  15. Re:How about 0 critical bugs? by AndrewNeo · · Score: 1

    They mean at any given time, they can stop, fix the 15 bugs, and release. Not release WITH 15 bugs.

  16. Yeah seriously, WTF??? by cultiv8 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Look at who started using Drupal in the last year or two: The Economist, The Grammys, Fast Company, The Examiner, House.gov (and all ~535 house websites) recently moved to Drupal, Energy.gov, WhiteHouse.gov, and here's a list of some 120 national governments using Drupal.

    But hey, Drupal only has 2% market share of all sites on the web, is being adopted by government and corporate organizations at a maddening pace, and just had their first major release in 3 years. There's no reason why this Drupal shit should be discussed on Slashdot.

    --
    sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
    1. Re:Yeah seriously, WTF??? by Curunir_wolf · · Score: 3, Funny

      But hey, Drupal only has 2% market share [builtwith.com] of all sites on the web...

      And yet has almost 22% of the CMS market share (from the link you provided). It's second only to [*cough* ahem! *cough*] WordPress.

      Maybe there should be more WordPress [*ack* *ack*] stories?

      --
      "Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
      --- Jerry Garcia
    2. Re:Yeah seriously, WTF??? by cultiv8 · · Score: 1

      Do we really want to discuss blogging platforms

      --
      sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
    3. Re:Yeah seriously, WTF??? by Adayse · · Score: 1

      Maybe there should be more WordPress [*ack* *ack*] stories?

      So there are a lot more Drupal advocates on /. why? Drupal is harder than than WP so when I don't feel up to battling with my Drupal module code I come here. I might come here after just installing a few module upgrades for a rest and to drum up some new business. Drupal is more work for the same result so it gets more attention.

    4. Re:Yeah seriously, WTF??? by Rhaban · · Score: 1

      So there are a lot more Drupal advocates on /. why? Drupal is harder than than WP so when I don't feel up to battling with my Drupal module code I come here. I might come here after just installing a few module upgrades for a rest and to drum up some new business. Drupal is more work for the same result so it gets more attention.

      Wordpress is easier because it is not a "real" CMS, just a glorified blog engine with a few CMS features. Sure, if your projet is within what wordpress can do, there's no reason to use drupal instead.

      But a lot of sites need features beyond what wordpress can offer, and that's where you want drupal or another cms.

      And if your site need a different structure from that of a cms, the next step is frameworks.

    5. Re:Yeah seriously, WTF??? by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      So there are a lot more Drupal advocates on /. why? Drupal is harder than than WP

      I see this claim often (usually with only one "than", however) with nothing to back it up. All I know about WP vs. Drupal is that I followed the install instructions for both back in the Drupal 4 days, and Drupal installed and WP didn't. To me that says WP is harder than Drupal. Can you provide some sort of citation that suggests that Drupal is "harder" than WP, along with some sort of indication of what that actually means? They're not minerals or even physical objects, so clearly one is not "harder" than the other.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    6. Re:Yeah seriously, WTF??? by lwsimon · · Score: 1

      This is truth. I started in web dev as a coder, and went to CMS Made Simple, then Django, and loved it. After getting the Internet Marketing bug, I realized that there is no need to code everything from scratch - my motto is "Get Shit Done, Then Code For Fun"

      I do 95% of my work in Wordpress, because there is just no need for more in a small site. If I need more, I go custom in Django or CodeIgniter. I'm looking at Drupal and Joomla now as a stopgap between WP and 100% customer work - so far, I think Joomla is going to win.

      --
      Learn about Photography Basics.
    7. Re:Yeah seriously, WTF??? by Rhaban · · Score: 1

      I'm looking at Drupal and Joomla now as a stopgap between WP and 100% customer work - so far, I think Joomla is going to win.

      This would be a big mistake.

      Joomla is tempting at first because it's easy to begin with, but it's going to break as soon as you try to do real work with it.

    8. Re:Yeah seriously, WTF??? by lwsimon · · Score: 1

      Well... I did just install Drupal and am learning to play with it now.

      Frustrating, but of course it would be - it's new to me. I installed a Gravatar plugin, and only want them on posts - no option to turn them off on the ID string for articles. I figure I could SSH in and yank that code section, but there has to be a legit way to do things like this. After all, it is touted as "You don't have to know how to code..."

      --
      Learn about Photography Basics.
  17. Web Dev Question by oldhack · · Score: 1

    How prevalent are Drupal, Joomla, etc. in web dev sector?

    --
    Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
    1. Re:Web Dev Question by nate+nice · · Score: 2

      Big and getting larger. Drupal is pretty awesome once you figure it out. I hated it at first and couldn't understand why it was loved by some but definitly understood why other loathed it. But then one day it all made sense and I couldn't believe the amount of power afforded the developer in making insanely cool Websites relatively fast and the few defects you're left with because a lot of the things that would cause problems are taken care of for you.

      --
      "If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer ..."
  18. Re:Blind leading the blind by sdiz · · Score: 1

    COUNT(*) count non null.
    COUNT(1) count all.

    In MySQL and all ANSI compatible database.

  19. So if I find a critical bug by Arancaytar · · Score: 1

    And there are already fifteen being worked on, all that this means is that I need to wait until one of them is fixed to report it? (No, of course not, but seriously, the thing about many regressions is that they somehow fall outside the functionality covered by unit tests, and aren't noticed in patch review.)

    Though I appreciate that the development process will involve closer attention to regressions and unit test failures known at the time of the commit.

  20. Re:Drupal hungry. News at 11. Drupal loves papa. by nate+nice · · Score: 1

    Yeah why would they want to cover a framework that is widely used, insanely great and of interest to a lot of people?

    --
    "If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer ..."
  21. A better way to speed it up by Adayse · · Score: 1

    If Dries were to promise that Drupal 8 will be faster and leaner than Drupal 6 and 7 then I'm sure a lot of people would pitch in to get it out the door earlier.

    If there are 15 critical bugs already and somebody finds a new bug in the existing code what happens then? Do they stop accepting bug reports?

    1. Re:A better way to speed it up by silanea · · Score: 1

      No, they will continue to accept bug reports. But they will stop accepting new features until that bug counter goes below 15 again. The idea is to prevent a massive influx of new modules and patches while running up a backlog of bugs that no-one gets around to fixing.

      --
      Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
    2. Re:A better way to speed it up by silanea · · Score: 1

      People do not take the time to actually read a text as one coherent unit, they just quickly scan over it and pick up a few keywords. I see a lot of that at university. Makes me cringe every time.

      --
      Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
  22. Re:Drupal hungry. News at 11. Drupal loves papa. by icebraining · · Score: 2

    The definition of framework has nothing to do with the size or difficulty of the codebase. From what I can tell from the project's website, it fits the definition.

    Drupal, on the other hand, is a CMS which includes a framework (for the modules/plugins).

  23. Re:Blind leading the blind by larpon · · Score: 1

    1. select count(*) from bugstore where bug_level='critical';

    That's soooo Drupal 6 in Drupal 7 we do awesomo stuff like:
    db_select('bugstore', 'b')->fields('b')->condition('bug_level', 'critical')->execute();

    that must have been the system that took them the 2,5 years from D6 to D7 - wrapping various home rolled PHP functions to SQL statements.

  24. Re:Krap by kuzb · · Score: 1

    ...and you stand by this argument by hiding. Bravo, you're an idiot.

    --
    BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
  25. Re:Drupal hungry. News at 11. Drupal loves papa. by kuzb · · Score: 2

    That framework you're constantly advertising ... dear god, it's the most terrible abuse of singletons I've ever seen in my life. Please, for the love of all that is holy, learn design principles.

    --
    BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.