[jdt-core-dev] Minimal-change policy?

[Stephan Herrmann <stephan.herrmann@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Team,

As most of you know aside from working in JDT I also maintain a fork
of JDT/Core for the Object Teams project.

Today I merged a big chunk of changes from JDT/Core into Object Teams
and found some changes worth commenting:


Some files had changes in line endings. While changes to test classes
had been discussed [1], classes SourceTypeBinding and SpaceSeparator
were transformed without mentioning in the bug. Merging just these
two files caused significant pain, eating my time that otherwise could
have been time to fix a bug in JDT.

Some files had huge changes in imports, apparently by using organize
imports, that transformed a few .* imports into pages of individual
imports and included re-sorting. I believe these happened during the
new index work. While also this can be seen as a clean-up, it causes
pain during merging.

These issues seem to be specific to Object Teams, but I think that
Groovy Eclipse is in the same boat, and given that the latter is
no longer officially supported by Pivotal, any difficulty during
merging could effectively kill that plugin, sooner or later.

So, please everybody keep in mind, what looks like nice clean-up,
can cause pain to others. If such operations are deemed necessary
for some reason, I'd appreciate if they are announced, and carried
out by a dedicated commit with no other changes, so that I can simply
skip that commit (and perform the clean-up by myself).


Also during the new index work, we got a new dependency. We now
require com.ibm.icu. Considering that this addition was motivated
by exactly one method call (for which an alternative exists),
and also considering that people are using o.e.jdt.core outside
Eclipse for various standalone tools, I think this, too, doesn't
carry its own weight. Can this be reconsidered?


best,
Stephan


[1] https://bugs.eclipse.org/497419