In any case (and note that this is a vote, not a veto) the main reason is that in doing this we risk to throw out the baby with the water: I prefer a lot to remove ProcessingExceptions comptely and have the Cocoon components throw all the exceptions that the container can and will handle. IOW, I don't want to have an implicit contract but a more detailed and explicit one. In any case, generic ProcessingExceptions are evil, and this is a fact that we have known for a long time.
We have something worse than generic ProcessingExceptions being thrown, we have components throwing CascadingException. Which not only force clients to check them, but create an unnecessary dependence on Avalon.
And I'm not going to throw out any baby. I'm going to throw out lots of totally useless "catch" clauses that do nothing but litter the code.
When we have done that, we'll have a cleaner baby, and we can send him to school so that he can learn to behave himself properly. But this is going to take time.
So, the options are: start small, remove useless code and do "continuous design", like Berin advocated. Or discuss for months, come up with a renewed exception hierarchy and take some more months to implement it.
As always, IMHO
Ugo
