Bug 87871

Description Jonathan Locke 2005-03-13 07:21:05 EST

It would be really neat if refactorings could be exported from a project to
allow people outside a given project to come up to date and assist them in
making changes in their own dependant projects.  For example, suppose Hibernate
changed their package structure.  If Eclipse could export all the refactorings
they did into an XML file format, then the Hibernate project could simply check
these into CVS in some project folder like ".eclipse/refactor" (probably wrong,
but i'm just brainstorming here) and when someone updated their Hibernate
project Eclipse could notice the refactoring that occurred and ask the user if
they want to apply it to their own projects.  The same XML file could also be
included in a given release containing all the changes since the last release,
or even all the API refactorings since the beginning of time.  Obviously APIs
will sometimes/often change in ways that require user intervention... but
Eclipse could help there too by noticing that a refactor was not simple enough
to reconcile.  In simple cases, Eclipse could help the user by putting text into
the user's code suggesting what to do to fix their problem.  For example a
comment saying "// TODO New xyz() method call requires a parameter... " This
help text could be part of the refactor XML file.  In some cases, a refactor may
be too large and a project may wish to hand-edit their refactoring XML files to
suggest that the user look at some documentation (instead of trying to apply the
refactor).