On 24/07/2020 18:42, Joe Darcy wrote:
At least from a few minutes thinking, I don't see a meaningful
compatibility issue in replacing
1) a public constructor in an abstract class
with
2) a protected constructor in an abstract class
It is source compatible, subclasses would have access to the
constructor in either case, and should also be binary compatible as
linkage shouldn't be impacted (because subclasses would still have
access to the constructor).
That said, for this exercise I'd prefer to replace the implicit
default constructors with equivalent explicit ones, but would be open
to future refinements to make the constructors protected.
I don't mind if we do it in one or two steps. My only concern is that
the javadoc will make the public constructor stand out a bit more and
newbies might think can use the public constructor. "protected" is
understood by few so a good deterrent.
-Alan
