public/private/stable/unstable

[Robert Collins]

On Tue, 2008-08-26 at 19:33 -0400, Aaron Bentley wrote:
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> Robert Collins wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-08-26 at 18:55 -0400, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> 
> > Plugins often have a devils choice between not working at all, or using
> > something the core considers 'not ready yet'.
> 
> Those are not their only options.  They also have the option of asking
> the core to provide a supported version, and I really wish they would
> exercise it instead.

They don't have that choice for a given release :- the only code they
can use is that in the release; its immutable. Certainly they can and
should discuss with core getting a version core consider 'baked' and are
willing to support/do deprecation dances on etc. I too wish we had more
discussions about that.

> > I think its fine if they
> > choose to do the latter - but not fine if they choose to use something
> > the core considers private. At least to me, private is not implied by
> > unstable/unsupported.
> 
> Then in your terms, I want it to mean both unsupported and private.  But
> I don't want it to mean "private" in the sense used by Java and C++.

So you want _ to mean unsupported-and-private, John is happy with
unsupported-or-private.

What I want is a way to signal 'unsupported but you can use it without
violating abstraction' (that is unsupported-and-public). Now, I'm happy
to signal that purely with comments, as I did in my most recent patch.
IF other folk are happy with that.

So can we do :
 _ -> unsupported-AND-private
no _ -> read the docstring
?

-- 
GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
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