One objection that’s been raised to “internal.provisional”
in the past is that provisional APIs are APIs you hope *not* to change, and that naming convention
guarantees you need to change at least that much. FWIW,
-t
From:
eclipse-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:eclipse-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ed Burnette
Sent: Friday, February 17, 2006
7:31 AM
To: General development mailing
list of the Eclipse project.
Subject: RE: [eclipse-dev] Best
practices for provisional APIs
From:
eclipse-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:eclipse-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Randy Hudson
I
would prefer just ".provisional" or ".experimental" prefix
in the package name. Clients are more likely to look at the API, which is the
whole point to releasing it in its "unpolished" state. Oh ....
and it's easier to type.
No, that doesn't work because Eclipse now
has all these access warnings set up that key off of ".internal". I
know that's configurable but...
Jeff, would it be good enough to encourage
usage by calling them .internal but having a comment in the Javadoc that says
something to the effect of "Yeah, it's internal but we expect it to be api
soon, so please try it and comment on bug xxx". And then users can
deliberately add those packages to the access whitelist. To me this is
orthogonal to what is done for things you know are going to be API but are iffy
during the milestones, you don't use .internal but you put a "this is
experimental" comment in the javadoc.
(If you really wanted to get fancy you
could have a new javadoc tag like '@visibility
x' where 'x' was your confidence level in how stable it was. Maybe something on
whether it was intended to be extended too. The compiler could adjust
diagnostics based on that. But I'm not actually suggesting that.)
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