[eclipse-pmc] Provisional API guidelines

[John Arthorne <John_Arthorne@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At last week's PMC call, we discussed
formally adopting Jeff's proposed update to our provisional API guidelines
[1]. Overall we were in agreement on the direction, but the question was
raised whether additional markup and tooling were needed to distinguish
provisional API from other internal packages. One approach to doing this
would be additional manifest markup as described in bug 234947 [2].

I have been thinking that another approach
would be a javadoc tag such as @provisional in the code itself. One advantage
of this is that it puts markup directly in the code where clients are more
likely to see it even if their tools are configured to ignore the warnings.
It would also allow for finer-than-package granularity of provisional API,
although I'm not convinced we need or want that. Conversely, manifest markup
allows multiple providers of the same package to declare different intent
(one could export a package provisionally, while another might declare
as full API). I'm not sure if that use case makes any sense, I'm just trying
to think through what advantages manifest markup has over markup in the
code itself. I must be missing some reasons here but hopefully Jeff and
Tom can chime in on that.

John


[1] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Provisional_API_Guidelines_Update_Proposal
[2] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=234947