January 15th deadline set for configuration metadata discussions

As I posted earlier in mid-December in Feedback needed on configuration metadata formats that our prior discussion on CMI metadata formats did not lead to successful results, and after a 320+ comment thread, it was broken down into three other issues to discuss more possible options. One of those has since been closed and the two other ones received little feedback and little progress.

However, the problems being resolved are not really avoidable in Drupal 8, so if we don't have better ideas, it looks productive to go with our best results so far (as opposed to not solving these problems in Drupal 8 altogether), so Greg Dunlap (leading the configuration management initiative) set a deadline of January 15th for decisions on the metadata formats, which would still give us some time to figure out any remaining concerns with the implementation before the extended feature freeze on the 18th of February. I agree this is a very timely announcement. Here is a full reproduction of his words:

I would like to establish a deadline for deciding how we're going to proceed with this. If we don't, we are going to go back and forth on these decisions in a circle until feature freeze comes and then we're screwed. My feeling is we will probably need about a month to implement any new proposal and get it to RTBC, so I'd like to lay down January 15 as our deadline or deciding what to do. If we haven't agreed on any new proposal, then we reroll the original RTBC patch from #285 and get it in. We have to get this done, and right now I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel which scares the crap out of me.

So there is just under a month to work out the new proposals and establish consensus. Lets do it or admit its not getting done and go with what we've got.

Explore the options and follow up on issues listed at https://drupal.org/node/1648930#comment-6859916 please. Thanks all for being involved and making this as good as we can!