There are a lot of proposals floating recently to churn the API. I'm going to move a direct no on all of this.
Mild improvements in consistency in no way justify any API breakage or even deprecation. Every method and class that currently exists in any commons library should continue to exist there with the same signature indefinitely. Compatibility is far more important than consistency. Do NOT redesign or rethink the APIs at this late date. Too much depends on them. New methods, classes, and packages, and projects can be added where appropriate. Internals can be improved as possible. But what's there today stays there, absent the very rare case where critical bugs or security issues require breaking an API. However, that's extremely uncommon. No API will ever be perfect or free from hindsight. But the cost of change is too high to justify breaking commons libraries. Stare decisis is as valuable a principle in API design as in law. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elh...@ibiblio.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org
