On 1. Aug 2019, at 20:44, Marshall Schor <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'm wondering if other codes will also break, and if the benefit of this > change > is worth the trouble it will cause in being backwards compatible. > > Opinions?
I think the change is a good one and should be kept. Getters and setters using generic containers should return/require the proper element type as defined in the type system. This removes the need for explicit type casting and allows for cleaner and more maintainable client code. It should be advertised as a feature and the version number should reflect that by increasing the "feature" digit. I am not sure if the change is actually binary-incompatible. Java's type-erasure for generics might make this only a source-incompatible change. It might be a good idea at some point to create a Maven module in UIMAJ-Core which contains some generated JCas classes and applies the API report plugin to them so we can get some feedback when there are incompatible changes in the generated JCas wrappers. -- Richard
