When he says the Drupal 8 Configuration Management system is only listening to one use case?

One reason no-one listens to Nedjo Rogers on this subject is that what he's saying is not that simple to understand. But I assure you it's well worth the effort. He's saying that the Drupal 8 Configuration Management system is built around a single use case that favors a certain enterprise need, namely that of single site configuration stabilization and propagation to other environments, principally live.

In his initial article on this subject (Bibliography #4, Nedjo Rogers) Nedjo wrote that the fact that “Sites own their configuration, not modules” (as stated in Bibliography #3, Alex Pott) constitutes nothing less than “a seismic shift in Drupal that's mostly slipped under the radar”. Nedjo first reviews the history of exportable configuration in Drupal, and correctly highlights the fact that there are two main use cases involved:

• To share and distribute configuration among multiple sites.

• To move configuration between multiple versions of a single site.

“By and large, the two use cases serve different types of users. Sharing configuration among multiple sites is of greatest benefit to smaller, lower resourced groups, who are happy to get the benefits of expertly developed configuration improvements, whether through individual modules or through Drupal distributions. Moving configuration between different instances of the same site fits the workflow of larger and enterprise users, where configuration changes are carefully planned, managed, and staged....”

“If anything, the multiple site use case was a driving force behind the development and management of configuration exports. The Features module and associated projects - Strongarm, Context, and so on - developed configuration exporting solutions specifically for supporting distributions, in which configuration would be shared and updated among tens or hundreds or thousands of sites.”

“For Drupal 8, however, the entire approach to configuration was rewritten with one use case primarily in mind: staging and deployment. The confiugration system "allows you to deploy a configuration from one environment to another, provided they are the same site."

If this is the case, then we really need to get to the bottom of this issue. The objective of this article is to briefly summarize the whole debate (see Bibliography), remove any items that are blurring or clouding the issue, and then underline three times those points that really deserve not being kept “off the radar” and which I hope others will delve into so that we can get a clear picture of perspectives and solutions (many of which Nedjo himself, and others, are spearheading already in third party modules; see below). It's an important question: what's in store for us in terms of industry-wide best practices for Configuration Management in Drupal 8, taking into account all important use cases? And it's a question that Nedjo took the trouble to raise in the Drupal Community as far back as January, 2012. But no-one listened. 

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