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

[Pascal Rapicault <Pascal_Rapicault@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Adopting what you are proposing would
actually represent a strong distruption from what is now current practice
in the eclipse ecosystem and would likely confused consummers.

Personnaly I'm in agreement with Dejan.
As an API author I should treat it like API and it should be in the namespace
where it will eventually belongs. However as a consummer I should make
sure that I'm treating it as an internal package, meaning that I need to
express my requirements on the provider of the provisional package very
tightly (for example, if I used jface.databinding I would say [1.0.0, 1.1.0)
since I can't be sure of what will be the API in 1.1). Doing so, will protect
me from changes in the API.

PaScaL

Boris Bokowski/Ottawa/IBM@IBMCA
Sent by: eclipse-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx

02/17/2006 11:03 AM

Please respond to
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Subject	RE: [eclipse-dev] Best practices for provisional APIs

+1 for using just provisional for unpublished "API",
internal for
implementation classes, and neither provisional nor internal for real API.

If this requires changes to the tools, or change to the codified Eclipse
Development Process, then why not?

I do think, however, that it is problematic if you don't change the package
name once an API is published.  There are two strong reasons against
putting non-API in a public package: First, you cannot be sure that clients
have to recompile to keep using the API.  As a result, when evolving
the
not-quite-public API, you now have to worry about binary compatibility
rather than just source compatibility.  Second, and this may only
apply to
Platform or the SDK: you would have to increment the major segment of the
plug-in version number in the case where you find out that the API needs
to
change.  Now consider the ripple effect of bumping the major version
number
of, say, org.eclipse.jface, and it becomes clear why putting (however
tagged) non-API in public packages is a bad idea.

If you are lucky and the provisional "API" stays unchanged when
publishing
it, you would only have to change the minor segment of the version number,
and all you require clients to do is to do an organize imports and update
their version number and dependencies accordingly.

Boris




                    
                     
                     
          
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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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