[Clirr-devel] Handling private/package-scope changes

[Simon K. <si...@ec...>]

Hi Lars,

In the original clirr design, all package and private classes, members &
fields were ignored, because they were irrelevant to the goal of
detecting "binary incompatibilities".

I added the *option* to include private and package things in clirr's
processing in order to be able to generate complete change reports.
However this currently has the effect of reporting binary
compatibilities for things like changing the type of a private field or
package-scope method return type when reporting on private items is
enabled.

I would like to keep the ability to generate complete change reports,
but restore the original behaviour of reporting ERROR and WARNING stuff
only for public/protected things, ie stuff that is intended to be
visible to "users" of the package.

What I have done is added the following methods to AbstractDiffReporter:
  public Severity getSeverity(JavaClass clazz, Severity s);
  public Severity getSeverity(JavaClass clazz, Method m, Severity s);
  public Severity getSeverity(JavaClass clazz, Field f, Severity s);

These methods are called from just about anywhere an ApiDifference is
reported from, and they "reduce" the severity from ERROR/WARN to info if
the specified class, method, or field is package or private scope.

Is this change ok by you?

Regards,

Simon