Re: [hibernate-dev] Marking API members as incubating
On 11 Jan 2013, at 12:18 PM, Gunnar Morling <gunnar(a)hibernate.org> wrote:
Here is the thing, we need to also need to start talking retention
setting of the annotation.
I think you were suggesting source retention. This means that the annotation is only in
the
source. That means the IDE needs to be linked to the source. I would assume that often
developers will setup their IDEs to download sources automatically, but it is not a
given.
Yes, you're right. See my response to Sanne's previous message:
> Btw. I got the retention wrong in my first message, it should be CLASS so a user can
see whether its present on any API members.
Ok. I was replying before reading all thread messages.
What I don't get is how a retention of CLASS works. So it is in the byte code, but
does not have to be retained at runtime.
This means I cannot reflectively determine whether this annotation exists. What's the
point in this case? The only way
to build tooling around this in this case would be to read the actual byte code. Or am I
missing something?
For the reasons you describe, SOURCE indeed is wrong, but I think
CLASS would suffice (that's also what Guava's @Beta uses) which
puts it into the class files of types using it. Or is there a need to access the
annotation reflectively at runtime?
See above.
Would the aftertaste be gone with using CLASS retention?
Not unless you explain me how one would actually use such an annotation.
--Hardy