...
- does not touch modules that are not in the standard distribution or contrib
- if all modules (including contrib) would be re-organized under clusters, paths inside the scripts could be simplified (i.e. clusters/platform/openide.util could become platform/openide.util inside the scripts)
- in the experiment, there is still a single global nbbuild/cluster.properties - would be better to split and place parts into individual repositories
- the directories under "clusters" don't necessarily need to map 1-1 to clusters: a single repository may contain code for multiple clusters. Like maybe ide and extide => ide, cnd and cndext => cnd, or even platform and harness => platform
- developers working on a cluster would need to checkout at least repositories for all clusters their cluster requires, transitivelly. Improvements can be considered, possibly using:
http://wiki.netbeans.org/DevFaqOrphanedNetBeansOrgModules - the experiment will create an unversioned copy of the sources - that would need to be changed to keep history, of course
- the main intent here is to experiment with a way to keep repository sizes smaller while keeping history. One of the risks here is that having (too many) repositories is also not inconvenient. So, some consolidation of clusters into repositories seems to be in order. As a data point, some other big projects are moving from multiple smaller repository to a single bigger repository (i.e. closer to the current NetBeans state):
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk9-dev/2016-October/004987.html