Description David Williams 2007-02-11 16:50:05 EST

I suspect this is some result of "fixing" bug 163443, but in M5 we started to get some warnings about "the constructor Foo() is  never used locally" if the constructor was private. 

From what I can tell, this is only for classes which do have a public constructor, which takes arguments. 

Case 1: which technically we could "fix" in our code. 

private Foo() {
  super();
}
public Foo(String s) {
   super();
   this.s=s;
}

This is a common pattern, and I think should not be flagged as a "not used" case. 
But, technically we could "fix" it (make the error go away) if we changed the second public constructor to use this() instead of super(). 

Case 2: which we can not fix in our code, and interacts with super class hierarchy. 

private Foo() {
  super();
}
public Foo(String s) {
  super(s);
}

In this case, the private constructor is (still) the valid way to denote that no instance can be constructed without a string, but we still get the red x. 

I put as "major" since I think this does qualify as a missing function. 
It pretty much requires developers to turn off the warning about private member functions.