Right now there is an important discussion on drupal.org: Figure out backport workflow from Drupal 8 to Drupal 7.
It is about Drupal 8 getting patches that they let to be known in Drupal 7 and Drupal 6 as well. This is going to be explained and summarized in the Backport Policy which is still under consideration.
Basically this means for developers who want to participate in the core that all patches work to Drupal 8. If I want to patch Drupal 6 I create an issue for Drupal 8 and give it a tag called “needs backport D6” or maybe “needs backport to D6 and D7”.
This seems to be stressful and complex und made me very insecure. In case of Drupal 6 most likely nobody will care.There are all the time changing issues for Drupal 7 and at first sight it does not make any sense to patch a system, which is still useless and Drupal 7 is not making any progress.
But it really makes sense to work that way. In the past have been many problems with this issue and it was always very annoying if the problem was solved for one version, but it was still present in the other version.
The real dilemma is that there is already a Drupal 8 branch without any maintainer and Drupal 8 is equal to Drupal 7. Webchick is responsible for Drupal 7 and has to get the sign off of Dries to Drupal 8. And Dries is able to spend 2,5 hours a week for working on the core. A maintainer that is full time responsible for Drupal 8 is not in sight so far and it might take some months until that. It might have made sense to create the Drupal 8 branch much later, but we have to deal with the way it is right now and it would only postpone the problem anyway.
Catch summarized the whole subject in this article.
This whole lot is waiting for a decision by Dries. I do hope that this is going to happen pretty soon and will bring clarity back to the process. Webchick, who is working partially on the core due to her new full time position at acquia, tries to release the versions of Drupal 7 at fixed dates. The eagerly awaited Drupal 7.1 is supposed to be released this week as well as Drupal 6.21 and 6.22. Despite all this it is proceeding fast.
