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grumpy (but light) short takes
An SCA officer posted a badly-worded announcement to the kingdom mailing list, prompting the vast quantities of speculation and challenges that she had hoped to avoid. (There had been none previously on this list.) There are better and worse ways to announce that something bad happened but you're not allowed to release any information yet. A good one is to say, e.g., "It is my sad duty to report that an SCA participant died at a fighting practice this weekend. We do not yet have permission from the family to release more details. Stay tuned.". A bad way is to say "something bad happened, please don't spread rumors, you'll be told what you need to know later, the presence of the word 'sad' in the subject line should give you a hint (nudge nudge, wink wink), no we really won't tell you anything, don't worry about it, don't bug us, and don't gossip". That trick never works. (As the moderator of a related mailing list, I now get to decide how much of the resulting traffic should get through.)
I would like for Java to provide one more publicity level than it does: "internal-public" (or, conversely, "api"). Not all public classes are meant to be used by applications; some are public only because they have to be visible to other classes in your code base. I'd like to be able to label which are which. I'm using a customized javadoc tool to produce the subset of documentation we want, but I get no compiler support this way, so I have to rely on home-grown tools and visual inspection to determine whether I have a self-consistent subset tagged for the API. This could have been easier, given perfect foresight. I'd be delighted if it were easier in the future. (I understand that .NET has a similar concept.)
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Assuming that package visibility isn't sufficient, another approach is to define your class as implementing an interface that only contains the API methods, and set things up so that application code is written to the interface rather than the implementation class.
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Writing exclusively to interfaces: interesting idea! Thanks; I hadn't thought of that.
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Excuse me?
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Here is the original message on the subject, and here is her followup message. If this is in fact about a death (or serious injury), as it appears to be, there were (IMO) better ways to handle it, ways that would have (probably) eliminated the followup conversation that is now occurring. She posted, ostensibly, to stop rumors; she succeeded in starting them instead. (Hers were the first posts there on the subject. She says people were already discussing it, but they weren't doing so on this list. So she blind-sided people.)
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The is so much talk right now about what activities the SCA inc wants to let us do I am hoping it wasn't a lyst accident.
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Nope. I only know what's been posted. Could have been a fighting injury, or a car accident on the way to practice, or a freak attack of unrelated medical condition, or, well, anything. No point in speculating; they'll eventually provide more info, and if it did have anything to do with the lists I'm sure it will be widely disseminated.
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More or less. The .NET "internal" keyword basically means that this item is visible within this assembly, which roughly translates to this .dll. The intent is that assembly boundaries more or less correspond to logical library boundaries, so it basically does what you want. (And in fact, I use the keyword mainly for its autodoc effects.)
Details on the sad event...
No kidding. Disseminated with 9000 new regulations, no doubt.
Re: Details on the sad event...
(I just saw a followup post. Someone did collapse and die at a fighting practice, but it had nothing to do with combat or equipment.)