On Feb 10, 2009, at 10:02 PM, Chris Aniszczyk wrote:
On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 12:51 PM, Sven Efftinge <sven.efftinge@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It might make sense in many scenarios.
However, we want to technically allow use of non-public API, therefore we've to export more than just the stable stuff.
We want to mark some of the exported interfaces, classes explicitly as stable, so the user can be sure that we won't do any breaking changes there.
In Eclipse, we accomplish this by exporting every package, whether it is x-internal or not because we find people want to access internal things. The things that are stable are simply the things that aren't x-internal. It's that simple :)
This clearly communicates what's public and what's not.
However, we have to change the namespace of an element whenever we'ld decide that it's stable.
This will break clients, which presumably have used this.
We're avoiding it by using an annotation.
But besides how we mark what's public and what's not (package name vs. annotation), we share the same philosophy.
That is we want to communicate carefully and clearly what's stable and what's not :-)
Cheers,
Sven
