Contrib.social

Change how distributions are handled

Open on Drupal.org →
Created on 29 June 2020, almost 4 years ago
Updated 15 June 2024, 13 days ago

I'd like to propose a change to how distributions are handled.

Today if someone builds a site from a distribution they are tied to that distribution. If the distribution is modified, or the site's configuration is modified beyond the distribution's bundled settings, or the distro falls behind how Drupal core or contrib manages certain configuration, the site has to work out how to handle that divergence.

Some of the problems and complexities of distributions were mentioned in #1356276: Allow profiles to define a base/parent profile → .

Proposal: Distributions be changed to be a "starting template" for building a site, after the initial installation everything would be managed by that site.

To do this, distributions would need to be restructured:

  1. A distribution would primarily become a list of dependencies (info.yml or composer.json).
  2. A distribution could include the existing .install, .profile files.
  3. A distribution could include configuration listed in a config directory, which would be installed by default.
  4. Support would be dropped for a distribution to include its own modules, themes, etc, those would have to be built as their own projects and added via #1.
  5. It would no longer be possible to download a distribution from d.o.
  6. Distributions would become options for composer's create-project system, e.g. "composer create drupal/openatrium myproject".
  7. Creating a distribution project would create the codebase as normal, and clone the profile to web/profiles/myproject with the required files renamed.

The end result would a a site built from the distribution without any dependencies or custom code which could not be managed entirely by that site.

📌 Task
Status

Fixed

Component

Idea

Created by

🇺🇸United States DamienMcKenna NH, USA

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