I've recently been working on a little side project to replace every use of a hardcoded "/" character in region names/paths with a reference to the Region.SEPARATOR constant. I ran into some problems though, since the geode-management module needs to know about the separator character (in the Region and Index classes) but does not have a dependency on geode-core, where the character is currently defined.
Since the whole point of the exercise is to attempt to provide a single place where the region separator character is defined, pulling the definition down into a module upon which both geode-core and geode-management depend seems like the sensible choice, so I'm proposing to create a GeodePublicGlossary class (name entirely up for change) in the geode-common/src/main/java/org/apache/geode/util/ package, moving the definition there, then deprecating the definitions in the Region interface in geode-core. To preempt a possible question, there already exists a GeodeGlossary class (which defines the GEMFIRE_PREFIX constant), but it's in an internal package, so isn't a suitable place to move the definition of the currently user-visible region separator character. Any feedback or suggestions on this idea would be very welcome.