Agaric wants automatic installation of dependent modules

Posted to the Drupal.org 2008 predictions thread:

Many useful modules available for Drupal 5 will either be forced to merge together, or forked/merged substitutes will appear as people become tired of dang diddly modularinos (sorry Ned Flanders).

I don't think that will happen, and if it does I think it will be a bad thing.

I do think people will see the importance of letting newbieuser (or expertuser for that matter) pick module W and have X, Y, and Z installed automatically.

This won't be solved in 2008 I'm afraid, but I hope we'll be on our way to a solution by 2009. Ideally Update status module could download the code from Drupal.org for you. Professional hosters would use a different approach but the potential security risk of the web server writing to sites/all/modules is a lot smaller than the out of date Drupal, I think.

Imagine selecting and installing modules from within your Drupal site! Then Drupal will be like Linux ;-)

Alternatively (and suboptimally) Drupal.org could package all required dependencies with modules and user-admins are expected to open their tarball first in sites/all/files (may not exist) or something where a helper module could zap duplicates, before the user-admins moves the module files into sites/all/modules or wherever they like.

I agree many dependencies for Drupal modules will be a problem, but bigger, less-modular modules will be a bad solution.

^{benjamin, Agaric Design Collective}

The leading way right now is http://drupal.org/project/drush but it's not an approach that lends itself to ease of use for new users. A Drupal web interface to Drush (which is a command line interface for Drupal)? Circular, but hey, why not!

Resolution