I share the same opinion. Infact hadoop (from which our annotations are derived I believe), talks about this, "Also, certain APIs are annotated as @VisibleForTesting (from com.google.common .annotations.VisibleForTesting) - these are meant to be used strictly for unit tests and should be treated as “Private” APIs."
https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r3.1.2/hadoop-project-dist/hadoop-common/InterfaceClassification.html On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 10:15 AM Sean Busbey <bus...@apache.org> wrote: > Yeah I would say no as well. We should make clear on our dev guide that you > also should be marking those things with an Interface Audience marking if > you don't intend them to be at the downstream API visibility of the parent > class. > > (IIRC we also use VisibleForTesting in IA.Private classes to proactively > explain why some internal looking member is at a wider Java access scope.) > > On Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 11:39 Nick Dimiduk <ndimi...@apache.org> wrote: > > > Hello, > > > > This came up over on the 2.3.0RC0 thread, so let's open it for proper > > discussion. In that context, we observe method signature changes to a > > method marked with the Guava VisibleForTesting annotation. The method is > a > > protected method on a IA.Public class. There is no method-level IA > > annotation. > > > > Do we consider the VisibleForTesting annotation as a specifier for our > > compatibility guidelines? > > > > I am of the opinion that no, it is not an InterfaceAudience annotation, > and > > so it is not applicable for defining our public API. > > > > What do you think? > > > > Thanks, > > Nick > > >
