[eclipse-dev] Making platform bundles more reuseable - A Mars target?

[Tom Schindl <tom.schindl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I know you are all busy working to get Luna out of the door but I'm
already looking at Mars ;-)

When looking into the codebase of the platform you find out that we
already have a nice seperation between core and ui but if you start to
dig deeper you find out that even the bundles who contain UI have a lot
of code in it that does not need SWT/JFace at all.

Of main interest to me are:
* org.eclipse.jface
* org.eclipse.jface.text
* org.eclipse.jdt.ui

I'd like to start a discussion how to break those bundles into a common
and an SWT specific part while maintain API compability.

Let's start with

jface.text:
-----------
As it looks like refactorings like this have already happened to some
extend because some of the code has the org.eclipse.jface.text prefix,
the first and most important package I looked into
org.eclipse.jface.text.rules which has only one class which does depend
on SWT DefaultDamagerRepairer, all other parts can be moved to
org.eclipse.text. Are we fine with split-packages?

org.eclipse.jdt.ui:
-------------------
In this bundle there's a lot of code that does depend on SWT but a good
other part is not and can be used nicely outside an SWT environment. The
first stuff I looked into is FastJavaPartitionScanner.

Before I proceed with this I'd like to hear from the people involved
(Dani, Markus, ...) if they would accept such a bundle split in Mars.

If not I need to copy over code and to e(fx)clipse which I'm fine as
well but it would be a lot nicer if I could simply reuse the stuff from
upstream. For the time being and to work on my proof of concept I've
forked the code so that I can proceed with my proof of concept.

Tom