Mike wrote:
...
IMHO the codebase is currently too much of a monolith for someone
approaching it for the first time, and breaking it up into mind-sized
chunks can only help in getting more people working on the codebase. I
strongly feel that this monolithic nature has proven too daunting a
target for many developers over the years - long before Jini became River.
A hard part of this will be refactoring all the tests.
Keeping the tests consistent with the source can be handled by setting
up a project in e.g. Eclipse that includes the test source code as well
as the main River source code. Do the repackaging using only Eclipse
refactoring, no direct editing of package statements, and Eclipse will
take care of the tests.
There is an orthogonal issue of examining the category markers in the
.td files to make sure they are helpful. Ideally, we should be able to
tag packages and classes with the test categories that should be run
when they are edited.
I am far, far more concerned about user code. A big upheaval could lose
us users, and make them less likely to recommend River to other users.
Patricia
