Julian Foad wrote: > [...] The users have no idea about that unless > the developer takes care to tell them, [...]
A further point. As a library supplier, our responsibility for APIs is *only* to the downstream developer. If that developer chooses to use our experimental APIs to build a product which does a useful job, it is not necessary that the developer must tell the users that it is uses some APIs that we declared as experimental. As long as that developer takes full responsibility for maintaining their application -- which in the extreme could involve maintaining their own copy of svn libs -- they are perfectly entitled to declare their application as stable. As a supplier of the command-line application "svn" we have a different responsibility to its direct users, but that is a separate responsibility. -- - Julian