RECONSOLIDATION-GOALS

The multi-repo approach taken over the last months was not a good fit for the
team. It was too fine-grained in its separation of repositories, and ultimately
caused more work than it was worth.

One key goal of the multi-repo approach was to allow developers to focus on and
own their areas of interest and expertise without being inundated by issues and
commits and pull requests from all other areas. But the multi-repo change was
made at the same time we instituted a strict C4-style fork-and-pull-request
model, and the impact of the latter change made a big difference on its own, by
keeping all topic branches out of the main repository, and by keeping master
clean. In the end, multiple repositories are not as necessary and useful in a
C4-style environment as they might be in other less rigorous development
processes. Reconsolidation won't be a panacea; there will be more noise for
people to deal with, we'll have to get better at managing and labeling issues,
etc, but on balance it is quite clear now that moving back to a single
repository is the right thing to do for most of the repositories that make up
the Bisq application and network.

Fully separate applications such as the Bisq explorer, Bisq markets webapp,
will not be included in the new monorepo; these are "Bisq applications", not
"Bisq itself". What will live in this repository are those things that are
essential to the operation and monitoring of the network.

This repository and these RECONSOLIDATION-* files are a dry run attempt at
reconsolidation without having to stop the world, i.e. issue a code freeze
across all repositories and figure it all out in real time. The
RECONSOLIDATION-LOG file tracks the actual changes made, in the order they were
made, and the RECONSOLIDATION-TODO file is a not-necessarily ordered list of
things to be done as they occur to the author. Ideally, we will complete this
dry run prior to the v0.7.2 release, issue a code freeze on all repositories,
and then quickly replay the the changes in the RECONSOLIDATION-LOG so everyone
can get back to work.

What follows are a list of goals for the reconsolidation effort. In a word,
though, the goal is simplicity.

* To simplify the build and release process. Single repo, single tag, single
  release notes, single source for binaries.

* To simplify and make idiomatic the developer setup experience.

  When working from the command line, the workflow should be as simple as:

    git clone bisq-network/bisq && cd bisq
    ./gradlew build
    ./fx/bisq-fx           # symlink to fx/build/app/bin/bisq-fx
    ./core/bisqd           #    "    "  core/build/app/bin/bisqd
    ./pricenode/pricenode  #    "    "  pricenode/build/app/bin/pricenode
    ...

  When working from the IDE (IDEA or Eclipse):

    clone bisq-network/bisq
    import project         # with zero errors
    run tests & apps       # with no additional IDE setup / config required

* To keep everything but third-party dependencies self-contained, i.e. no need to
  resolve bisq-* dependencies via JitPack or other remote repositories. This is
  both for security reasons as well as developer convenience and elimination of
  the inevitable hassles that arise from having a more fine-grained internal
  dependency model (failed builds on JitPack, needing to keep many versions up
  to date, etc.)

* To keep Bisq's Java API effectively internal by not publishing it anywhere
  and not depending on it in any of the apps we build and maintain. This allows
  us to stay flexible with the Java API for refactoring, etc, and puts the
  focus on Bisq's forthcoming HTTP and RPC APIs as interfaces for trading bots
  and other applications.