> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Stuart Ballard
>
> FWIW, I strongly agree with John about protected classes. Protected
> members of a class *ARE* part of the public API in Java. They are
> included in the Javadocs just like public members. It's a fundamental
> feature of Java that some APIs are used by extending the base classes,
> and protected members are made available for precisely this reason. The
> undocumented APIs are the package-private and private members, and we
> certainly shouldn't include those - but protected members *are* part of
> the public API, and *are* documented, and we *must* provide them if we
> wish to be compatible.
>
> Sorry if this sounds aggressive, I just think full compatibility with
> the documented Java spec is of *primary* importance to Classpath.
>
> Thanks for listening to my rant ;)
>
Can you show one example of a protected class in the documentation? I think
that would settle this for good. Paul asserted that there were no protected
classes in JavaDoc and concluded based on that that Sun didn't intend for
protected classes to be part of the public API.
--John Keiser
