[hibernate-dev] Marking API members as incubating

[Hardy Ferentschik]

On 11 Jan 2013, at 12:18 PM, Gunnar Morling <gunnar at 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