The original idea of friend apis was to allow development of an api with the understanding that nobody gets things perfect the first time, so clients v could be developed but at the risk of dealing with breakage.
The point was for the api to be in friend mode until it matures, at which point it becomes official compatible api. That's the part that never happened - no mechanism pushing moving apis out of friend mode. I'd suggest a rule that that happens automatically if a friend api has been around for more than 2-3 releases. Enforcement of that could probably be automated with a bit of auto bug filing cleverness. -Tim On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 7:11 PM Peter Nabbefeld <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello all, > > I personally don't like "Friend" APIs, as really I like the idea of an > open, extensible IDE. > > From my point of view, Friend APIs make it difficult or impossible to > extend NetBeans for personal use: > - You have to ask for being added to the friends list. This is > especially a problem, if You want to implement some private-use feature, > e.g. for Your employer. > - Alternatively You could depend on the implementation version; but I > don't see how to do that, if You're using Maven. > - Third possibility is just patching the modules to remove the friends > and make the API public - very ugly, and You have to do it after every > update. > > OTOH, having a friends-only API leads to fewer dependencies on the API, > thus less impact from changes to the API, which makes work easier for > the developers, of course. > > However, if an API isn't stable, yet, it could also just be flagged as > "Under Development", thus telling users of those, that it is subject to > change. Also, as it is possible to use default methods in interfaces > from Java 8, it should be less of a problem to extend an existing API. > But You can use the API on Your own risk without any conflicts. > > An exception of course is having APIs only for modularity, if classes > are spread over different modules and need an API to interact with each > other. In this case the API's purpose is not to integrate extensions, > but to split responsibilities - in this case I fully agree these are not > for public use. > > I'd be interested in comments on this - so, what do You think? > > Kind regards > > Peter > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] > For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] > > For further information about the NetBeans mailing lists, visit: > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NETBEANS/Mailing+lists > > > > -- http://timboudreau.com
