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Re: [eclipse-pmc] Provisional API guidelines


These points have won me over to the side of manifest markup, in particular the need for pure binary bundles to indicate their API-ness regardless of availability of javadoc. However at this point in the release cycle I'm not sure the framework and tooling teams have the time to implement new manifest markup and tooling in time for Helios.

In the end this seems like a nice thing to have, but seems separate from whether we adopt your proposed new provisional API guidelines. With both old and new guidelines, provisional API is marked x-internal. A different manifest attribute would make it a little easier for clients to distinguish their use of internals from use of provisional, presumably with the benefit that they can ignore warnings about using provisional API without ignoring warnings about other internals. This doesn't seem like an urgent enough benefit for us to push on getting this supported added for Helios.

John



Jeff McAffer <jeff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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03/15/2010 02:20 PM

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Re: [eclipse-pmc] Provisional API guidelines





The reason I liked the manifest markup is for "consistency" with the x-internal/x-friends tags which really talk about what is API and who can use it (e.g., the contract). Having said that, there is an element of history here. Traditionally the manifest markup was what was driving the tools. With the advent of API tools etc, this kind of JavaDoc markup is more interesting. Some random thoughts:

- You must be able to ship a binary bundle and indicate what parts are provisional such that I get errors when I develop code using those provisional API (assuming I say I don't want to use provisioning bits) then we have the bulk of the function we need.

- Have to talk about how to indicate provisional-ness on packages.  In the package.html?  Where?

- Reconcile the multiple locations for markup related to package API-ness (some in manifest, some somewhere else, ...)

Summary: I would like there to be some markup.

Jeff


On 2010-03-15, at 2:03 PM, John Arthorne wrote:


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_______________________________________________
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