RE: [eclipse-dev] Best practices for provisional APIs

["Ed Burnette" <Ed.Burnette@xxxxxxx>]

 

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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.)