[recommenders-dev] Levels of unstable code

[Andreas Sewe <andreas.sewe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

going through our code, I recently realized that we have three
annotations to mark unstable code: @Clumsy, @Experimental, and @Provisional.

My first attempt to consolidate them <https://git.eclipse.org/r/8302>
into just a single @Provisional annotation was shot down by Marcel, who
claims that some of the annotations indeed bear different semantics
(although @Provisional is by far the most common in our codebase). To me
this distinction is a bit lost, though; at least the annotations'
JavaDoc comments don't stress the differences enough.

To improve upon the current, confusing situation, I suggest to introduce
a single @Unstable annotation ("unstable" being the most generic term I
could come up with) with a "value" enum detailing the cause of the
instability. (Marcel agrees with this approach in principle.)

Now, the question is what are good values for this annotation and
whether there is a natural progression (e.g., for "Alpha" to "Beta")
between the different levels. I'd thus like to gather some onöist
consensus on these values. So, please suggest (hopefully
self-explanatory) values along with a short description we can put in
the enum's JavaDoc. Thanks.

Best wishes,

Andreas
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