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List:       lucene-dev
Subject:    Re: Interfaces
From:       Doug Cutting <cutting () apache ! org>
Date:       2005-03-17 18:18:11
Message-ID: 4239C9E3.9000802 () apache ! org
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Erik Hatcher wrote:
> Ultimately, though, the decision to refactor the codebase to use 
> interfaces more pervasively lies with Doug.

Actually the decision lies not with me, but with the Lucene PMC as a 
group, according to Apache's voting process:

http://www.apache.org/foundation/voting.html

But, like other PMC members, I do have veto power.  Fortunately I've 
never had to use it.  We've always come to agreement through reasoned 
argument.

In this particular case, I do not object to making interfaces for 
IndexReader and IndexWriter.  What we need is a well-designed, 
back-compatible, fully-javadoc'd patch that implements this.  Folks 
(including myself) may have reasonable objections to the first version. 
  So it will take some patience and determination to make such a change 
to these core classes.

My guess at the best way to approach this is to add new interfaces 
(e.g., named IndexReadable and IndexWritable) and to then have 
IndexReader and IndexWriter implement these.  That makes 
back-compatibility easier.  Then one could add factories too.  Someone 
proposed IndexReaderWriterFactory as a name.  Why not just call this 
IndexFactory?

Finally, this change, on its own, is not a high-priority for me.  Long 
term, I hope we can re-structure these APIs to make them extensible in 
more interesting ways.  Consider point 11 in section 1.2 of 
http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta-lucene/Lucene2Whiteboard as an example. 
This sort of thing would probably best be implemented by decomposing 
IndexWriter and IndexReader into sets of interfaces.  But until we do 
that I don't think I would make use of interfaces here.  So if others 
would make good use of these interfaces, then the onus is on them to 
make the change.

Doug

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