At the recent PNW Drupal Summit held in Portland, Oregon, I attended a session by Jonathon Hedstrom about Drush Make. Here are my notes:
Drush Make is:
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used to make Drupal Distributions
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has site manifest including every version and patch
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easy for devs to quickly get up to speed on a project
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you can eliminate duplicate repositories
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encourages contributing back to the community
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encourages well thought out patches instead of hacks
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simplicity of having info in one place
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download multiple Drupal modules at the type of a command
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pulls code from all over the internet
With Drush Make you can easily download external libraries. Many distributions are not available on Drupal.org because it does not have support for storing external libraries on its site. So Distros are stored on places like GitHub.org or other 3
rd party websites.
Here's some more info from Drupal.org:
Among Drush make's capabilities are:
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Downloading Drupal core, as well as contrib modules from drupal.org.
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Checking code out from CVS, SVN, git, and bzr repositories.
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Getting plain
.tar.gzand .zipfiles (particularly useful for libraries that can not be distributed directly with drupal core or modules).
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Fetching and applying patches.
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Fetching modules, themes, and installation profiles, but also external libraries.
Drush make does not turn modules on automatically: it only assembles Drupal directories -- it does not touch any database.
Thank you to Jonathon Hedstrom for a very interesting introduction to Drush Make. You can view his slides here: jhedstrom.github.com
