How many repos?

Hello world,

The modulization work I did recently makes it pretty easy to bundle
XML Calabash extension steps in separate repositories. Just put all
the relevant jar files on the classpath and you're done. It'll all
"just work".

I've separated some steps out into separate repositories already:

* The MarkLogic XCC steps
* The RDF steps
* The DiTAA step (to resolve a weird build issue that I later
  discovered was caused by PlantUML including an older version
  of the DiTAA classes)

Those are all extension steps and I'm tempted to break out a few more:

* cx:metadata-extractor
* cx:send-email
* cx:plantuml

Those are candidates mostly because they each have further
dependencies so removing them makes the XML Calabash release smaller.
They're also probably not widely used.

More controversially, perhaps, I'm tempted to break FO processing out
into a separate repository. FOP in particular has a lot of
dependencies; moving it into a separate repo would reduce the size of
the XML Calabash distribution by almost 25%. I'd probably move CSS
processing out as well, just for parity.

Practically speaking, this would mean that if you didn't also download
the FO jars, you couldn't do FO processing with XML Calabash. (The
p:xsl-formatter step would fail with a class-not-found exception.)

One could go all the way to the absurd and bundle every step
separately, but that'd clearly be overkill.

I'd be intersted to hear with users and developers (especially
developers that bundle XML Calabash into other products) think about
the "multiple repos" question.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh
Lead Engineer
MarkLogic Corporation
Phone: +1 512 761 6676
www.marklogic.com