While I read your email I found myself wondering "To what are we referring to when we say 'API'"? ;)
Are you talking about a public interface? Or are you talking about "any class that's public and any public method within a public class"? If the latter, my primary theoretical concern is that if we pull in code that has components that are scoped public for cross-package accessibility within-project, promoting those to "public by default" immediately calcifies their interface whether we intend for that to be consumed or not. Basically, we don't have an interim scope layer between "package private" and "public" that corresponds to "project public". In theory the post JDK9 modularity kind of provides that but then everyone just add-opens bulldozes across things (the joys of legacy code...). I think "Any interface that's public is a public API" is pretty obvious to maintainers and users and good. I'm also good with "anything public is an API unless otherwise documented" and we add a simple annotation like @INTERNAL <https://github.com/apiguardian-team/apiguardian/blob/main/src/main/java/org/apiguardian/api/API.java#L87> from API Guardian to basically say "yeah, this is public, but it's not intended for public consumption" (I think we should roll our own to match our proposed lifecycles but that's a clear example of the idea). I'm worried about the approach of "Any public method in a public class is considered public API and you can't change it". I'd prefer we start with a more constrained surface area we commit to as being an API and widen it later if we find there's a need; it's much harder to go in the other direction. On Fri, Aug 14, 2026, at 1:24 PM, David Capwell wrote: > Josh and I talked about this offline and not perfectly in-sync so would be > good to get other peoples views > > My take is that if you are adding the API to this shared repo we need to care > about backwards compatibility so things should be PUBLIC by default (anything > that is java public is part of the public interface and breaking changes are > not allowed without a long enough deprecation window similar to > Cassandra’s.). I think Josh is in favor of using a annotation to mark that a > API is public, but without custom tooling I don’t think anyone will notice > and then we will get to a effectively public state and breaking changes will > be a nightmare to deal with for the community. So if you want to post the > API here, it should be stable and we shouldn’t be putting APIs that have not > been fleshed out first. > >> On Aug 7, 2026, at 8:16 AM, Josh McKenzie <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> One thing worth immediately calling out that we might want to split out: we >> *could* do this work in Ant. >> >> It would be somewhat more imperative and brittle: we'd explicitly >> orchestrate the build ordering in Ant, while relying on the Gradle build >> inside Accord for its cassandra-utils dependency resolution / source >> substitution. That leaves us with a somewhat more complicated mixed >> Ant/Gradle build relationship but it's entirely workable for an interim time. >> >> So if the Gradle migration is a sticking point, we can break that out into a >> separate discussion and CEP rather than making it part of CEP-65. >> >> Doing so would mean retaining and extending some of the complexity in our >> existing build system that a future migration could remove, but it's not a >> crushing amount of additional complexity. The benefit of doing that work >> here with this CEP is that we have one more concrete build need providing a >> reason to move toward a unified build stack, and it fits the "clean things >> up and refactor as you're working on things that could benefit from that >> work" approach many have argued for in the past on the project. >> >> On Fri, Aug 7, 2026, at 10:58 AM, Josh McKenzie wrote: >>> As per the previous ML thread: [DISCUSS] Forking Cassandra utilities into a >>> separately released library >>> <https://lists.apache.org/thread/7kllp45vvonsg7ggzxpz39c5kdcy7r6g>, David >>> and I put together a draft of what we discussed and worked through some >>> implications and requirements that came up as we tried to nail things down. >>> >>> The goal here is to provide a material backstop to continue our discussion >>> and version it. As with all CEP DISCUSS threads, this is very fluid and >>> none of it should be taken as settled or an implicit mandate. Let's see if >>> we can make some progress on this long-standing pain point in our ecosystem. >>> >>> CEP-65 DRAFT: link >>> <https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/spaces/CASSANDRA/pages/446071230/CEP-65+cassandra-utils+-+A+shared+utility+library+for+the+cassandra+ecosystem+DRAFT> >>> >>> *Why You Should Read This Draft:* >>> 1. Build system impact: we need a parent project and one of its submodule >>> to depend on another submodule. We're proposing freezing ant's API surface >>> area, maintaining that into perpetuity, and moving to gradle going forward. >>> 2. Branching model: read the draft to see what "One Branch to Rule Them >>> All" means. >>> 3. API Lifecycle: Is @BETA/@STABLE/@DEPRECATED enough? Do we need a >>> @PRIVATE? >>> 4. To Release or Not To Release: we're proposing consumers embed this as a >>> submodule initially to minimize friction in moving shared code into a >>> shared space. >>> We have 1 outstanding unanswered question we didn't come up with an >>> opinionated proposal for: >>> >>> What should unannotated methods and classes in the library be considered by >>> potential consumers? @PRIVATE? @PUBLIC? Should we lint and fail on any >>> class without a top-level annotation forcing us to make a choice on our dev >>> list [DISCUSS] threads whenever we bring in new things? >>> >>> There's no timeline on this thread; let's keep turning the crank on this >>> until we've hit our pareto-polish frontier. ;) >>> >>> ~Josh >>> >>> >>
