Bruno Dumon wrote: > > Hi Carsten, > > I saw you changed some instance members in Woody classes from private to > protected. I used to have the habbit of making everything protected by > default, with the reasoning of making classes easier subclassable in the > future. Woody was the first project I tried to do it the other way > around: make everything private by default, and see how quickly that > would bring me into troubles. > > I'm now wondering if the changes you did to Woody are simply part of > applying some general design principles or if you came into trouble > because of private members? Or to put it in another way: do you think > instance members should always be made protected by default? > Yes, at least in this case. Now usually I think the separation between private and protected should be used. But in open source development I now tend to make nothing private, because those things that the developer thinks should be private could not be used by others using this class for whatever reason. So I thing making things protected instead of private doesn't really hurt but also empowers the open source development a little bit more.
In this particular case I had the need to change one instance variable which I currently don't remember anymore (ComponentManager perhaps) and then I started changed everything that came across my eyes. I hope this makes sense :) if not at all, we can revert it. Carsten
