Django has, for a long time, operated as a small-ish community. When you're a small community, people generally know what's going on just because they hear things and there's a lot of trust in each other. As projects get larger, you often need a more formal structure.
For example, Django has been slow to release and has even recommended that you run off SVN. That's great when you're an involved person who knows what's going on, but less fun for a casual user of the framework. Django is getting more casual users.
That's great too, but sometimes it requires organizational change. Django hasn't been (and probably will never be) the boisterously-led community that Rails is. It isn't the personality of its leaders. That said, I think we're going to see a lot more communication happening. For some people, Django has dropped the ball here, but the 1.0 plan definitely cleared a lot of things up and I hope we similarly create a 1.1 plan over the coming months to provide a neat roadmap for developers).
In terms of the framework moving forward, I think the 1.0 release will fix a lot of complaints that people have had. One of the problems with the "run-off-svn" mentality is that you're very cautious about putting in big changes. However, with the run-up to 1.0, we've seen qsrf, newforms-admin, geodjango, etc. all merged. I think the 1.0 stable release will give us the opportunity to get through a lot of the other patches on SVN as people use 1.0 in production.
Every community stumbles, we can always do better, and Django is moving forward and post-1.0 is a great time to start changes. As a developer with a post-1.0 item in queue, I'm excited. Yes, it's frustrating when you've contributed a patch just to see it wait in queue. Hopefully version stability will change that.
Django has, for a long time, operated as a small-ish community. When you're a small community, people generally know what's going on just because they hear things and there's a lot of trust in each other. As projects get larger, you often need a more formal structure.
For example, Django has been slow to release and has even recommended that you run off SVN. That's great when you're an involved person who knows what's going on, but less fun for a casual user of the framework. Django is getting more casual users.
That's great too, but sometimes it requires organizational change. Django hasn't been (and probably will never be) the boisterously-led community that Rails is. It isn't the personality of its leaders. That said, I think we're going to see a lot more communication happening. For some people, Django has dropped the ball here, but the 1.0 plan definitely cleared a lot of things up and I hope we similarly create a 1.1 plan over the coming months to provide a neat roadmap for developers).
In terms of the framework moving forward, I think the 1.0 release will fix a lot of complaints that people have had. One of the problems with the "run-off-svn" mentality is that you're very cautious about putting in big changes. However, with the run-up to 1.0, we've seen qsrf, newforms-admin, geodjango, etc. all merged. I think the 1.0 stable release will give us the opportunity to get through a lot of the other patches on SVN as people use 1.0 in production.
Every community stumbles, we can always do better, and Django is moving forward and post-1.0 is a great time to start changes. As a developer with a post-1.0 item in queue, I'm excited. Yes, it's frustrating when you've contributed a patch just to see it wait in queue. Hopefully version stability will change that.