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Drop the jspecify nullness annotations - #429
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elharo
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This makes me wonder if we could just drop this. The 18 different variants of Null/NonNull/Nullable etc. feel like an experiment that has failed. I've never seem them improve robustness in any meaningful way. They're applied haphazardly and never checked.
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Review of the provided-scope change (#429) asked whether the annotations earn their place at all: they are applied haphazardly, never checked by a tool in this build, and add a dependency to the graph of every consumer. Removing them leaves nothing to scope. The only behavioural surface was RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME metadata on public signatures; nothing in this library or Maven core reflects on it.
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Review of the provided-scope change (#429) asked whether the annotations earn their place at all: they are applied haphazardly, never checked by a tool in this build, and add a dependency to the graph of every consumer. Removing them leaves nothing to scope. The only behavioural surface was RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME metadata on public signatures; nothing in this library or Maven core reflects on it.
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Removes the
org.jspecify:jspecifydependency and every@NonNull/@Nullableannotation it supplied, in place of the provided-scope change this PR first proposed. The review on that version asked whether the annotations earn their place at all; they are not checked by any tool in this build, so dropping them is the smaller change to the consumer graph than adjusting the scope.The diff is large only because spotless re-joins signatures that fit on one line once the annotations are gone. No method body changes.
What consumers see: the runtime annotation metadata disappears from public signatures. Nothing in this library reflects on it, Maven core has no reference to
org.jspecifyat all, and NullAway or similar checkers were never wired into this build. I have not audited the other consumers; one that referencedorg.jspecifytransitively through this artifact would need to declare it itself.After the change
dependency:list -DincludeScope=runtimeyieldsslf4j-api,jansi(optional) andcommons-io.Verified:
JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v 17) mvn -B verify-> Tests run: 788, Failures: 0, Errors: 0 (JDK 17); spotless clean;dependency:list -DincludeScope=runtimeshows no jspecifyThis change was created with AI assistance.