Re:Drupal's Golden Handcuffs
by mechanical_fish on Wednesday October 03, 2012 @03:09AM
(#4606225)
Views, specifically, have been exportable into version-controlled code since Drupal 5, and the ability to do so is a prominent feature in Views v3 for Drupal 7. Indeed, the Feature module, which spearheaded the current effort to make every Drupal configuration setting expressible in version-controlled, script-deployable code, is based on a pattern invented by Views years ago.
Exporting views to code has been shaky at best. And worse: once it's exported to code, there is no way to only import the bits that have changed. You must recreate the whole thing anew.
That's not version control, that's an export function.
All of the configuration for my Drupal sites DOES live in a VCS (it just doesn't have to, and many people don't bother).
Drupal 8 is continuing to make this easier and more powerful, by (amongst other changes) making configuration live in the filesystem by default, turning the copy in the database into (one of several options for) a cache.
"Configuration lives in configuration tables" : the OP's point exactly. Configuration should live in a VCS
Bear in mind also that "configuration" van be so complex with Drupal it's often more along the lines of being "an application". A non-trivial view is hugely complicated and yet all its settings and code live in the database entirely, with no way to either back it up in a VCS or deploy it from a development environment to a live environment without manually copying the settings from one to the other.