Hi all, Recently a discussion came up on HADOOP-13028 about the wisdom of overloading S3AInputStream#toString to output statistics information. It's a difficult judgement for me to make, since I'm not aware of any compatibility guidelines for InputStream#toString. Do we have compatibility guidelines for toString functions?
It seems like the output of toString functions is usually used as a debugging aid, rather than as a stable format suitable for UI display or object serialization. Clearly, there are a few cases where we might want to specifically declare that a toString method is a stable API. However, I think if we attempt to treat the toString output of all public classes as stable, we will have greatly increased the API surface. Should we formalize this and declare that toString functions are @Unstable, Evolving unless declared otherwise? best, Colin --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: common-dev-unsubscr...@hadoop.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: common-dev-h...@hadoop.apache.org
