I've been pondering the tension between stability and innovation. Once 3.0 is out I'd like to add an alpha subpackage:
org.apache.commons.lang-alpha It's specifically a location of code that is: a) Not linked to a version. When we move to 4.0 it does not change. b) Does not offer backwards compatibility. Classes move out of lang-alpha and into lang3 (or lang4 etc). Not all new code goes there, but much does. The 'contrib' package of an open source project is an essential aspect of allowing the project to innovate without burden. If I can convince us to achieve a goal of frequent releases, we'll need to be able to release code that we're not 100% sure about into our stable packages. It doesn't solve the cataclysmic changes (moving to Java 5.0 for example), but it handles a lot of items. I'm not wedded to the alpha name btw; would love to hear of a better one. A side effect that I like is that people can monitor the changes to the alpha package to get a feel for what's coming/what's arrived. Hen --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org
