Ross Gardler wrote: > David Crossley wrote: > >Ross Gardler wrote: > > > >>I've not thought through the implications of this. I'm pretty sure that > >>moving tools out is a good idea (notice I suggest a tools subdirectory > >>when moving eclipse, that was for a reason ;-) feel free to rubbish the > >>idea though (or even agree with it ;-) > > > >I don't yet see what we gain by doing this, other than > >people can checkout certain parts separately. > > My thinking is that we move all plugins code out of core. Most devs are > not interested in most of the plugins, yet they have to checkout > everything. Similarly, most devs are not interested in whiteboard or tools.
There are a lot of people interested in whiteboard at the moment ;-) > When we consider things like full docbook support in a plugin we will > have lots of XSL, DTD etc. from the Docbook project. This will be a > pretty large plugin, others may also get pretty large. DocBook is not a good example, because we decided to develop a download system for such cases. But yes some plugins will grow large because of additional jars, or large content like the gallery plugin. > By extracting the plugins, tools, whiteboard etc we enable devs to > checkout just the core stuff and any particular parts they want. Hence > checkout (and subsequent "svn status" and similar commands) happen > quicker. Using svn:external we can still provide a single checkout for > those developers who want everything. That is what causes me confusion. When *any* developer does an 'svn checkout' of trunk, then they get all the pieces anyway. So no benefit regarding volume of data. Am i missing something? One benefit that i do see is that those pieces can have separate release cycles and can have branches. That also adds a lot of work at release time, but it is a lot of work anyway. > Similarly, some devs are not interested in core, but would like to work > on docs or on, for example, the OOo plugin. These devs would be able to > work on them without having to checkout the full Forrest svn. That is where i can certainly see benefit. However, it would be preferable that developers work with the current core. I suppose if we have proper and automated testing, then we will discover inconsistencies. -David
