Drupal In Flight

Time

22-Dec-2007 8:51pm EST

Siting on the plane, working on the webcomic module. The plane is going late. There was quite a bit of mixup at Dallas - there was a stop over there on my trip from Denver to Washington DC. That aside, the good thing is, I was able to work a bit more on Drupal. I have a neat development/test setup of XAMPP + Drupal 5.5 on my Ubuntu.

I had become a co-maintainer sometime back, but had just reviewed a patch given by someone else for porting the module, put it on CVS. Yes, there was one small, minor, patch. It was regarding the .info file.

.info file was quite a nifty thing they added for the Drupal 5. Other than identifying itself, it let you define the dependancy modules. If the dependent modules were not installed and enabled, the framework does not let you enable that module. The webcomic module depends on Image Module and Views Module. Someone had caught the bug and reported in the issue queue. It was a small change to the .info file that ensured that the image and views modules are installed and enabled. But with that, :) I put in the first (meta) code change.

Speaking of dependancy - Webcomic module depends on Image and Views modules. The present port, does not actually integrate with views and I am working on that. I did some quick, as-it-is integration, and it threw some scary looking SQL errors for some conditions. But Eaton (when I caught him at #drupal Freenode IRC), said that it might not have been working in the first place - when it was for the 4.7 core version. Any case, that needs to be worked on.

Again, speaking of dependancy - as Webcomic is dependant on Image and Views module, the porting of Webcomic module to 6.x (#203008), is going to depend on them. The maintainer of Views module, merlinofchaos, seems to be quite busy with it, but doubts it would be ready when Drupal 6 has a stable release. I am not even sure of Image module as I could not find any 6.x branch in its CVS tree.

It is going to be tight. This is one of the reasons I feared from using too many contributed modules. And it is the reason I got into becoming a co-maintainer of Webcomic Module. I suspect, I will be using it in the future - near future - and I do not want to be torn apart between choices, that too when I can help. Again, I am not judging Eaton here for his choice on making Webcomic dependant on Image and Views. Both those modules are quite robust modules and can be said to have a following - at least Views has. It is almost part of core. There are some who want Views to be in core - but that is for another discussion.

Time

23-Dec-2007 10:55 am EST

Waiting at the breakfast table, after a good night's sleep. I like the chcange of scene.