[jwt-dev] refactoring

[Christian Saad <christian.saad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi guys,

since Hudson is currently on vacation, I'm writing this mail because I'd 
like to hear your opinions about an issue which is bugging me for quite 
some time now. I'm aware that it's quite a controversial subject, so of 
course I don't expect that you have the same perception here :)

Doing some maintenance work on JWT in the last weeks and months, I 
currently have ~60 (!) JWT plugins in my workspace. As you know of 
course most of them have been added at one time or the other to provide 
a new feature or extension of an existing one and have been categorized 
accordingly which at least provides some sort of overview.
However, in my opinion we have reached a critical amount which makes it 
very hard to maintain (technical&documentation-wise) all existing 
plugins and which makes this maintainance also very error-prone. In 
addition I think it's very confusing for new users and/or developers who 
stumble upon such a huge repository of potentially (un)interesting 
plugins and I fear that some may not be willing or able to invest the 
time to find what they would need and move on.

Therefore I would like to suggest to think about some possibilities for 
refactoring, i.e. deciding where a package-wise distinction inside a 
single plugin would be sufficient and preferrable to completely separate 
plugins.
Given our limited resources, I would take a really pragmatic approach 
taking into account our personal experiences over the last years, e.g. 
even go so far ( yes, the final frontier ;) ) as to say why not merge 
model&edit code (in my experience in "real life" the model is never used 
alone, and even if it is, the disadvantage would only be a few 
unneccessary dependencies to emf edit but chances are that it's present 
in the target environment anyway).

Ok, so I hope you're not too completely shocked by my reformist ideas 
(alas I haven't nailed them yet to the door of the university) and I 
would very much like to hear if you have the same perception or if you 
don't see a problem at all or if you have different ideas about solutions.

Regards,
Chris