Accumulators, What are the pros and cons that you can see for moving the SortedKeyValueIterator into the public API?
Right now, I think there's still some need for improvement in the Iterator API, and many of the iterators may not be stable enough to really recommend people use without some serious caveats (because we may not be able to keep their API stable very easily). So, there's a con. In the pros side, iterators are a core feature of Accumulo, and nearly all of Accumulo's distributed processing capabilities are dependent upon them. It is reasonable to expect users to take advantage of them, and we've at least tried to be cautious about changing the iterators in incompatible ways, even if they aren't in the public API. Recently, this came up when we stripped out all the non-public API javadocs from the website. (reported by Dan Blum on the user list on March 4th: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/accumulo-user/201603.mbox/%3C066a01d17658%24bc9dc1b0%2435d94510%24%40bbn.com%3E ) What would it take for us to feel comfortable moving them to the public API? Do we need a better interface first, or should we isolate the other iterators into another package (some of that has already been done), or should we wait for a proper public API package (2.0?) to provide this interface in?
