Some small refactoring on legacy package (part 2)

[cmaglie]

This is another refactoring of the legacy package.

As for #1064:

These are smaller/medium changes that are preparatory for other bigger PR.

I found myself juggling those small patches here and there in other branches, so I've decided to bite the bullet and put them in a smaller PR and merge them once for all.

Each commit has a self-contained change, they should be fairly easy to review.

[matthijskooijman]

Looks good!