Change the property visibility to private

[stof]

Currently, everything uses protected properties in the bundle. This means that all properties are potential extension points, and a change on them will be a BC break.

As we want to follow semver, I think we should rather use the private visibility for properties and switch to protected only for places where we decide to expose a supported extension point. This will make thing easier to manage BC. A request to increase the visibility will need to be justified with a use case for the extension point (allowing us to decide whether it is the right way to provide such extension point).

Note that this rule will be common for our users, as it is the rule applied in Symfony itself.

what do you think about it ?

[stof]

note that the same should apply to the library. I don't think it is worth to duplicate the discussion on both repos though

[ddeboer]

I agree. Let’s keep in mind to only change properties to private for which we have good extension/override options.

[stof]

@ddeboer I would go the other way. Change everything to private, and introduce extension point where needed. If we keep protected visibility because we don't have an extension point yet, we will never be able to change it because of BC.
and we cannot foresee all possible extension needs. The great thing about switching everything to private and asking people to justify the request to change vibility is that this allows to discover more extension use cases (if people can hack their way through the protected properties, they will never tell you why they needed to extend your class)

[dbu]

+1 from me to make everything private that is not obviously intended as extension point.

did you intend to work on this @stof or was it just an input from your side?

[stof]

no, it was input from my side while looking at the code

[dbu]

okay, will try to work on this then. don't want you to become afraid of giving valuable input ;-)

[ddeboer]

@stof You’re making some good points there, so @dbu go ahead, and make it private! 😉