Preview mode for new/enhanced detectors

[jrivard]

In several years of using this great tool, I periodically run into issues where a new detector is added or enhanced, but is overly aggressive. In subsequent updates the detector is further refined to be less aggressive / more correct.

Following this cycle can be a bit of a rollercoaster for spotbugs users, one is forced to either rollback the spotbugs version and wait (and in the scope of large projects this can be confusing or forgotten about) or add an exclusion via config or annotation that won't be necessary in the future, and is probably never undone and worst of all - mask actual valid issues that spotbugs has rightfully detected.

To avoid this, would it be possible to add some type of "preview" mode so that new detectors can be tried by the community before they are fully adopted? Ideally this would let new detectors be more aggressive in experimentation and also give more confidence when detectors are finally "promoted" to complete status. Spotbugs users would get warnings (but not errors) about preview detectors - and could also configure preview detectors to cause build errors for testing/evaluation purposes.

I recognize this would add additional overhead to spotbugs development cycles, and only a small subset of spotbugs users would notice/act upon preview detectors - but I still think it would be a net benefit.

Thoughts?

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[ThrawnCA]

Might be better to create new detectors with Experimental priority, rather than have a whole different mode.