Sanne Grinovero JavaDoc is one thing, but I also mean working with the types e.g. in a library. 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 than if there is one _internal_package on the top-level an I just can ignore this complete sub-tree.

Regarding separate JARs for public and internal parts, we did this for Seam and the approach is generally not bad. But it requires that there is no cycle between public and internal parts, which can be hard to achieve in some cases (I don't know the exact situation in HSEARCH, though).