I agree with you that breaking existing API's is a bad thing. However, the project is currently at 1.0-dev and the main page itself states:

   * The code is unreleased
   * Methods and classes can and will appear and disappear without warning

While changing the API at this point is less than ideal, most people would accept that there exists a potential of change between 1.0-dev and 1.0. When it comes down to it, all we're talking about is changing a public method's return object from a Hashtable to a Map. This is likely the last opportunity to make this (trivial) change before the v1.0 release and it would then have to be postponed until 1.1 (or whatever). I think changing it now is in everyone's best interest.

Although I disagree with you in this specific circumstance, you've got a great point in general. This weekend I plan to follow Corey's feedback and break the patch down into discrete parts, one for Checkstyle clean up and one for this code change. That way, the commiters have the freedom to decide if they want to break the API now or down the road.

Thanks for the food for thought,
Eric

Eric Spiegelberg wrote:

Matt Benson wrote:

I just joined the list myself... (for sandbox
commons-pgp) but I noticed that in the non-checkstyle
changes from this patch, the signature of a public
method is modified in at least one place. This will
break already-compiled code running against the
library.  Over in Ant-land we consider that bad; I can
only assume the same would be true in Jakarta commons.

$0.02,
Matt


--- Corey Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


Eric,

Firstly, welcome... Secondly... thanks.

There are two things that would like to suggest with
your patch.

First:
Please try to break this patch down into discrete
sections.  i.e. one
patch for formatting and one for each of the other
changes.

Second:
Please submit your patch(es) to the bugzilla as
files.  This allows
use to keep everything in one place.

Again, welcome and thanks.
Corey




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