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March 2012

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Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:47:57 -0500
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UofMN Web Standards <[log in to unmask]>
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Brian Hayden <[log in to unmask]>
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On Mar 30, 2012, at 1:06 PM, Chad Fennell wrote:

> Still, Drupal has been making significant inroads into the enterprise
> in the past couple of years (e.g. http://www.acquia.com/customers),
> however, so maybe that will change.  I hope it does.  For my own
> purposes, MySQL quite easily handles my needs.  If it's good enough
> for Facebook, it's good enough for me :).

Our users would probably revolt if we were as stable and responsive as Facebook. How's that for flamebait? ;)

> Well, when you have more contributors than just about any other
> software project on the planet, you're going to have more than a
> couple of bug reports. I mean, with a smaller developer community,
> Ubuntu has 92025 open bugs.  But you don't hear me up on the roof of
> the Walter building shouting "OMG! Ubuntu Haz Bugz!!!" :) It's
> actually a sign of the project's overall health - people are
> participating, important stuff floats to the top. Welcome to a big
> open source project.

But, an OS and a CMS aren't at all apples-to-apples... but I'll take your larger point. 

> The question is how well Drupal core and key modules address security
> bugs and solve critical and severe bugs.  For these, I think the track
> record is pretty good, and will get better as functional/unit tests
> become more complete over time (we have 100% coverage in core right
> now, but with lots of room for improvement).  Just throwing out "4,000
> open bugs" is just FUD without context.

Just to be clear, again, I didn't mean that to be evidence that Drupal is "bad". Rather, exactly what you said above--it's very much aimed at a certain profile of user and use case, and if you're not in the mainstream things may not be as plug-and-play, "There's a module for that!" as advertised. 

My basic concern is that I'm running into advertised features--for example, Views claiming to be able to use multiple databases, aside from your main Drupal db--that aren't actually fully implemented, and you can't necessarily know that until you've sunk a lot of time in it. There are patches for quite a few of these issues that have been stalled for months or longer due to lack of anyone taking ownership for testing and verification. Doesn't mean there's "a problem" in some absolutist sense. Different projects have different focuses and priorities. Just something to be aware of if you think your needs are likely to fall outside of the 99% at some point, and you don't have a lot of your own programming resources available to take advantage of the open-source-ness. Like you said, it's just about gathering enough info to make a sound judgment of right-tool-for-the-job.

-Brian

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