public/private/stable/unstable

Aaron Bentley aaron at aaronbentley.com
Wed Aug 27 00:09:54 BST 2008


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John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> Robert Collins wrote:
> 
> ...
> 
>> And:
>> _ means *either* is fine, as long as no review ever says "dont use
>> symbol _GAM because its private" when the symbol is actually public but
>> unsupported. So choosing "means either" will cause reviewers to know
>> their symbols better, or cause them to stop commenting on usage of _
>> symbols.

> My personal vote is for _ == either. It is simply a way to convey to people
> wanting to use the api that we don't guarantee it will be preserved without
> warning. A "use at your own risk" flag.

That sounds like "unsupported", not "private".

> I believe Aaron has different feelings. He felt *very* strongly that
> _iter_changes was never-ever supposed to be used by anyone without pushing to
> get it "public" first.

Clearly, we have different notions about what "unsupported" should mean
to the API's user.

I need a way to write code so that I do not have to worry about
backwards compatibility when I change it later.  _iter_changes was a
failure in that regard, because we actually deprecated it.  That's
technical debt there, debt I thought I was not getting into.

How can I write code without having to worry about backwards compatibility?

> My feeling was that it was there, better than
> everything else, and we just wanted some time to polish it before we committed
> to backwards compatibility.

No, I was waiting for feedback from Rob that never came.  That's why I
marked it unstable.

Aaron
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