Hardy, that's a great defence on keeping the api/impl/spi division as close as possible, i.e. on the leaves: so when - as a coder - I need to reshape some logic in the - say - backend I have a nice structure keeping all code related to the backends together.

I'm not too concerned about javadoc either, I replied to Gunnar thinking he was concerned about the javadocs because I don't see why it otherwise helps the consumer (other than Javadoc).

Gunnar Morling

As a user, I find it personally more distracting if there is an internal package within each single public package of the library I'm working with ...

How is that distracting? Sorry I don't mean it with sarcasm I'm genuinely not getting it, especially not why this is so important vs. keeping an existing API as is.

That is not the case for example for org.hibernate.search.backend.impl and its sub packages.

That one can certainly be polished during the refactoring works but I'm not looking forward for a naked pull which doesn't have more good reasons to it than just moving things around.