Module management in Drupal

The title of this page should be project management because Drupal uses projects for delivering modules. A companion video shows the Drupal 5.x situation. Using drush, my drush_mm patch and update status to manage and install modules command line. This video shows better dependency checking than currently available in D7. As I hope is clear I want to contribute to implement this into D7.

Click To Play

Drupal has a few tools for managing projects. drush and update_status are capable of updating a project. This is done by downloading tarballs. There is no better management available at the moment. After a project is installed onto the filesystem module management comes into play. This blog and others is about my vision how package/project/module management should be done in drupal 7 The actors (in short) are:

module.inc

Is capable of enabling/disabling and installing a module. I haven't found the uninstall!

install.php

Is capable of installing drupal and a chosen profile

update.php

Is capable of doing an update and/or upgrade

drush_pm

With drush_pm packages can be downloaded commandline

update_status

Checks for new versions is done

drush_mm (a patch for drush in progress)

(un)install and en/disable modules

What do we miss in this list?

1. module dependency management. When enabling a module from a project like ubercart the admin user has to enable modules multiple time. Just because the dependency check is not deep enough. Same goes for disabling. (drush_mm can do this)
2. uninstalling has no dependency check whatsoever. I'm not sure whether it should have but modules with a parent child relation should definitely be dependant in handling the relation before the parent disappears.!
3. downloading project tarballs from core. (drush_pm can do this.)
4. project providing module or how to find the project a module belongs to. Ie with ubercart one can install google_analytics but the project name is googleanalytics (without '_'). How to resolve this?
5. project dependency management. Some project version need specific other project versions

In my next blog I will elaborate on these missing issues and talk about solving dependancies the better way.