On 10/21/06, Stephen Colebourne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Henri Yandell wrote:
> Why not just start a branch within Collections?
>
> I don't see why this is a new component, are we going to be advising
> people to use Collections 3.x on JDK 1.5+ for any reasons other than
> legacy or instability of our generified version?
>
> My view is to make a collections-generics branch in collections with a
> view to it being Collections 4.0.
Because commons isn't like other OSS projects. We can't go around
changing our APIs freely, even between major versions. Its a simple case
of us being at the bottom of the stack of jars. If we do change an API,
any API then jar hell ensues because higher OSS projects will clash on
their required versions of [collections].
Thus, it has to be a new package, and this is best thought of as a new
component.
(Compare this with the JDK where they had to jump through ridiculous
hoops to make generics fully backwards-compatible, and created a
half-arsed mess in the process...)
From a simplistic user perspective seems to me that the compatibility
achieved by the JDK is successful. I don't understand the intricacies
required to generify a library, but if we could do the same wouldn't
this be the best solution from a user perspective?
Perhaps you could expand on what the issues are with the JDK approach
and why they're not desirable in Commons Collections - when I look at
the differences for example between the generified and non-generified
versions of java.util.List, I don't see the mess you describe.
Also I don't understand the compatibilty issue - does the following,
for example, constitute a break in compatibility?
Going from:
boolean add(object o)
to:
boolean add(E e)
Apologies if these are stupid questions, but seems to me that if we
could retain backwards compatibility it would be the optimum solution
from a user perspective.
Niall
Stephen
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