Hi All, As discussed several weeks ago, I think that Ivy needs some refactoring to ease the understanding of its code base for new developers.
I plan to start this refactoring tomorrow, it will introduce many changes to try to get things cleaner and easier to understand. My first focus will be: + split the Ivy class by features in: ++ IvySettings, which will be the result of the configure step (I do not use configuration to avoid confusion with module configurations) ++ ResolveEngine, which will be responsible for dependency resolution ++ RetrieveEngine, responsible for the retrieve step ++ and so on for each features/tasks The Ivy class will preserve an API similar to the existing one, but will only be a Facade to other classes. Moreover, methods taking too many parameters (like resolve) will be refactored to take a fewer number of parameters, using a class (like ResolveOptions for instance) to group those which are not first class parameters I will also work on the dependency resolution algorithm, and especially on IvyNode. I will split it into at least two classes, one representing the node in the dependency graph, and one with data related to the traversal of this graph during the resolution process. Another thing I'd like to address is to reduce the number of classes in the same package, and the number of packages of the same level (namely org.apache.ivy.* packages), to move to something more structured and hopefully less confusing. This refactoring will introduce many API incompatibilities, but it should hopefully help people to understand the code. This is only the big picture, I'll keep you informed of my progress, and try to process by steps to allow frequent feedback and discussions. - Xavier
