Hi all,
the Xtext repository has grown a bit fat and I think it's time for diet.
People coming to Xtext get overwhelmed by the amount of code and features it offers and especially for contributors it has become a bit hard to understand what the thousand projects are supposed to be used for.
A user not interested in IDEA should not be faced with IDEA projects. A user not interested in Eclipse should not be faced with eclipse projects. A user not interested in Java-integration should not be faced with Xbase projects.
I started a wiki page a couple of days ago, where I proposed a restructuring of the projects into separate git repositories [1]. Please have a look and give your feedback.
This will also have an effect on how we build the projects. Currently we have a big build comprising of Buckminster, Gradle and Maven. The non-Eclipse projects should be built with a standard Java build system (I'd prefer Gradle over Maven). It should be possible to clone and build.
Also it should be easy to have a workspace with those projects checked-out in any standard Java IDE. Currently these projects are PDE projects so only Eclipse works. At the same time these projects need to work nicely in a workspace where the Eclipse plug-ins are checked out as well. I.e. in that case they still need to have the PDE nature and of course all the core projects need to be proper OSGi bundles.
The restructuring shouldn't change any API of course.
We've started in a branch 'restructuring' to get the core projects isolated (still using Maven Tycho). We will merge this into the master after the release and keep working on modeling the project groups and their builds. At some point when we have the structure we want, we need to do the big repo-splitting. At that point it is important that no-one has any pending changes (we will send another notification) and the repository gets freezed. We will try to keep the history as much as possible when splitting up the repository into individual ones.
Please let me know who is interested in participating in the doing of all this.
Also please respond with the concerns you have. I know this is a big change and will have a big impact on the project and how we work on it.
Cheers,
Sven
