Support for Apple Extensions

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi Alan,

On Fri, 5 Jul 2013, Alan Bateman wrote:

> On 05/07/2013 17:44, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
>
> > Alan, I think you might be surprised what kind of reactions your
> > suggestion to remove -- even parts of -- a well-established, wide-used
> > API elicited.
>
> I haven't proposed removing these APIs.

Well, it was quite obvious from your question "what parts of this API are
used anyway?" that you are not quite interested in supporting them all
into the indefinite future.

> I have instead just asked a few questions to try to get some clarity as
> to their status and also to get some understanding as to which of these
> APIs are used. One motive to understanding their supportness is
> modularity as it's important to know which APIs might need to be
> "exported".

Sorry, this does not make too much sense to me. I do not know what you
mean by "exported". I know that there are APIs that are available, but
deprecated, so if that is what you mean, please say so.

> See also JEP-179 [1] for the proposal to try to capture the support
> status of APIs so that it is clear to both JDK maintainers and to
> developers using the JDK.

Again, what other sense does such a question have than to get away with
stopping to maintain APIs that are in wide-spread use? In particular,
Apple has been very good at burning me, e.g. with the removal of support
of the well-used Quicktime4Java API. So I have been warned: Apple takes
away things even if they are still used, even if they are still needed.
That might explain why I reacted a little more forcefully to your
questions, however innocent they were intended to sound.

> > Maybe you can explain what benefits there are in removing that
> > established API, and maybe you could elaborate why those benefits
> > outweigh the costs?
> >
> > I am curious,

And I am still curious.

If you do not intend to remove support for those still heavily-used API,
why ask in the first place? If you intend to remove it, however, what is
the cost/benefit consideration? Do you actually care about those users? Or
is it just a question how much effort to spend on maintaining something
that was determined to be undesired by somebody?

I am sorry if that sounds aggressive, but I still would like to know the
answers to those questions and I haven't read anything close to a
response.

Ciao,
Johannes