>From a developer point of view, I certainly support the radical approach especially after I realized keeping backward compatibility is so damn hard. I have blogged something on this topic.
http://kennethxu.blogspot.com/2006/06/is-definition-of-map-interface-broken. html But from a common library user perspective, backward compatibility is essential as we have so much code written depending on Commons-Collections. We wish the Bag is the same Bag so that we can pass the reference between legacy codes and newly developed type-safe codes. After all, interoperability with legacy code is one of major selling points of Generics. So is there a compromise act? > I would add: > - base package: All interfaces + Utils (CollectionUtils, MapUtils etc) I too think it make sense to have base package include all interfaces (about 20-30 as of today). And the compromise might be that as long as we keep those interfaces backward compatible, majority of legacy code can happily interoperate with new type-safe code. I checked near all the code in my domain. None of them refers to class of commons-collections in its public interface, while interfaces like Bag, Transformer and etc are used. Interfaces like MulitMap cannot be generified and still maintain backward compatible given the Map definition in JDK 5. We can deprecate it and give the Generics version a new name like One2ManyMap. Kenneth Xu --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
