A smaller footprint for WordPress, and a developer copy.

WordPress’s 8mb

WordPress is JUST over 3mb (I just downloaded it to be sure), and work is being done to keep it small. But no, due to the nature of open source and how anyone can work on it, it’s not going to have a dev version and a user version.

I’m saying ‘no’ cause this gets pitched about once or twice a month, and the devs have always said no. So really I’m not SAYING no, I’m telling you the answer I’ve seen for five years has been no, over and over again. 🙂 Been there done that, got the t-shirt.

No one wants to maintain both sets of releases, basically. There’s not enough need for it to be an issue just yet. Of course that may change one day, but not today. If I can find the trac ticket about it, it would better explain the reasoning. This HAS been discussed quite a lot over the years, and thus far, there’s been no compelling reason to do it.

Heck, we folded WPMU into WordPress to stop having to have two releases. With code that’s being continuously developed and worked on by hundreds of people at once, the comments let anyone pick up the code, change it, and move on. That benefit, thus far, outweighs the size complaint.

At 10 megs uncompressed, it’s still a pretty normal size for what it is. Drupal and Joomla are about the same these days. Heck, most people upload videos bigger than that today. 10 is nothing, and the devs are trying very hard to keep the size down.

I don’t do much work on a repository, but I’d imagine you’d maintain one master, and then just export two versions from the one code base. No extra maintenance work really. What repo system is being used?

SubVersion. Think of it as constant development, though. No one checks out files, edits, and checks in like on TFS or (god help me) PVCS. You take a file from trunk, edit it, create a diff, and put the diff in as a suggestion. Then if they like your code, the diff is merged in.

Open source is a VERY different process from how most companies with a set number of staffers do things. Anyone can make a diff file, but only certain people can commit the changes. This flies in the face of how my office does things, for sure! 😀 Imagine thousands of coders, but only a dozen or so quality control checkers who approve the changes, if that helps. Because those thousands need constant, immediate, access to the current code, and because trunk (which we test against) changes daily, we would loose dev-time to spin out two versions.

It’s really weird, if you’re used to ‘normal’ development 🙂 I tried explaining it to my boss and he shook his head and gave up, but we’re trying it on a project just to see if it improves output for code that doesn’t have strict deadlines on.