PR for commits from mimuw-distributed-systems-group

[shevek]

I hope this PR ends up on JCPP, not on mimuw!

[ooxi]

~~Thanks for your effort! It's really great to see that each and every one of your commit seems to be cherry picked. But since Github only allows integrating the hole pull request at once (afaik) it would be great if you could open multiple pull requests (one for each type, maybe even every commit).~~

~~That way it would be much easier to investigate your changes and thus accept them :)~~

Edit: Damn it, I didn't see that it's you @shevek :D nevertheless great job!

[shevek]

@ooxi Thank you! Since the PR will track the difference between the two masters, I'm really cheating and using github as a live diff view between the two trees. I don't plan to merge this PR, I just plan to work until it's minimized, then close it.

I tend to have Opinions about how things should be done, so I read carefully before I adopt to master.