[hibernate-dev] Marking API members as incubating

[Hardy Ferentschik]

On 11 Jan 2013, at 12:30 PM, Gunnar Morling <gunnar at hibernate.org> wrote:

> I think hovering over a method I want to use in my IDE and seeing it is annotated with @Incubating gives me that information much faster than going to a wiki or online docs.

would you get that out of the box?

> The latter also doesn't give me the possibility for tool-based access to this information.

Yes in theory, but honestly do you really expect someone is building such a tool? Maybe if this 
@Experimental/@Incubating annotation would be some sort of standard, but building a tool
to discover incubating features of let's say Hibernate Validator seems over the top.

> Are there any specific issues you see about using an annotation?

I am not per se against it. I am just trying to fully understand how it would look like (aka
retention, etc). For now the only convincing argument for me for such an annotation would be
the generation of the "Use" javadocs. For that a SOURCE level retention would be sufficient.
The tooling argument I find not very convincing and is imo only practical in case of a RUNTIME
retention.

--Hardy