ThreadGroup.enumerate/activeCount - any good reason not to deprecate?

[Alan Bateman]

Does ThreadGroup have any fans out there? I'm looking to deprecate its 
enumerate, activeXXXCount, and list methods. Also Thread.enumerate and 
activeCount. I'm trying to identify if there are any important usages of 
these APIs that would suggest they shouldn't be deprecated. A static 
analysis of the artifacts in Maven isn't coming up with much.

One reason for deprecating these methods is that they are inheriting 
racy. The javadoc has recommended for many releases that they be only 
used for debugging and monitoring purposes. The javadoc has warned, 
since at least JDK 1.1, that the enumerate methods silently ignore the 
case where the array isn't large enough.

Another reason for deprecating these methods is that they are obsolete, 
even for monitoring purposes. Java 5 added ThreadMXBean, ThreadInfo and 
better ways to get information on live threads.

Finally, there is "threads" array keeping a reference to every Thread in 
the group. That array is problematic for several performance reasons, 
and ultimately it would be nice to have that go away. Making that go 
away will require re-implementing a number of JVMTI functions that 
operate on threads groups but there are alternative ways to implement 
those (Serguei Spitsyn did an initial prototype to check this).

For now, I'm just trying to see if there are any important usages of 
these APIs that I may have missed.

-Alan.