On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 12:52:09PM +0300, Anton Avtamonov wrote: > > As I wrote elsewhere, I propose that packages whose naming convention is: > > org.apache.harmony.<modulename>.<something> > > > > represent internal APIs. All visible (public/protected) types in those > > packages can be used by class library developers from any module, and > > such developers can expect the API to be evolved in a compatible way. > > > > Module developers should not rely on the stability of anything starting: > > org.apache.harmony.<modulename>.internal > > > > and are strongly discouraged from referencing visible types in such > > packages since these are type internal module implementation code (and > > when we turn on OSGi runtime checks the imports from other modules will > > fail). > > > > > From other hand if we are talking about using these useful classes only > > > inside Harmony then it's probably a good idea. But we need some procedure > > > for moving a class to utilities package and we need to notify developers > > > about class capabilities. > > > > Moving it to a 'utilities' package should be as simple as making it a > > non-internal package name; and the notification is javadoc of those > > non-internal types. > > > > If people agree I'll write something for the website along these lines, > > if not we can continue to debate it on the list.
+1 (to the website thing, though debate obviously is fine too :-D). I personally think that it is a good idea to seperate out non-J2SE-specific non-Harmony-specific stuff as much as possible. I also think it is a good idea to evaluate very carefully on a case-by-case basis whether it makes sense to have that kind of code live under the "harmony" banner -- experience has shown that breaking out "true" utility stuff can help result in wider usage of that stuff which tends to result in more bugfixes, better code, etc. For example (and I'm being really naive here) I can imagine that java.util could be built on top of jakarta-commons-collections, or that java.util.logging could be built on top of log4j (now that'd be cool). But this is just me imagining stuff that might be possible in the future. For now it doesn't make sense to worry or think about this too much - we'll see what kind of ties between harmony and something like jakarta-commons (or whatever other part of the open source java space we're on about here) is possible as the issue comes up. cheers! Leo
