I think it should be okay to remove them. When I imagine myself on other side, a dev using client api of Foo project, and I see a class returning reference to an internal class, I would not trust that function. If I really need something from returned ref, I'd probably use it, and if it goes away tomorrow, i'd probably curse it too, but I can't complain since it's not anything I trusted to being with.
Now thinking as dev: Given that documentation explicitly states that functions can disappear from private class, and nothing about transitiveness, I believe we can remove functions from private class A. On Thu, Nov 26, 2015 at 7:10 AM, Ted Yu <yuzhih...@gmail.com> wrote: > bq. we should not remove it directly > > My understanding is the same. > > Cheers > > On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 10:22 PM, ashish singhi <ashish.sin...@huawei.com> > wrote: > > > Hello to all. > > > > I know that we can safely remove any APIs from a > InterfaceAudience.Private > > class and the same is described in the HBase book. > > > > Now consider a case (I did not find this mentioned in our semvar), > > There is a class 'A' with InterfaceAudience.Private and class 'B' with > > InterfaceAudience.Public and then there is a public API in class 'B' > which > > returns an instance of class 'A'. (We missed to mark the public method in > > class 'B' as deprecated when we marked the class 'A' as > > InterfaceAudience.Private). > > > > Now the question is, can we remove the public APIs from class 'A' without > > marking them deprecated ? > > > > I think we should not remove it directly, it will break the users using > > these(removed) public methods from class 'A'. > > P.S: This point came up in HBASE-14769. > > > > Regards, > > Ashish Singhi > > > -- Regards Apekshit Sharma | Software Engineer, Cloudera | Palo Alto, California | 650-963-6311
