What do people think about internal extension points? Currently, there is no concept about “internal” extension points in Eclipse besides using the convention of having “internal” (ie., internalTweaklets) in the extension point name along with some terse documentation. I know there are also products that don’t ship extension point schemas (.exsd) to prevent their users from extending schemas they don’t want. This is kind of funny because Eclipse is still aware of the extension point it just can’t help the user extend it… since there’s no schema… in essence… the extension point is being hidden… yet it is still there:
I think we can do better than this and try to mimick the concept we have with internal packages and x-friends. For example, imagine an extension point you wanted to define to be used just but your plug-ins for now… it’s useful for you internally but not ready to open to the public yet. In PDE, we could allow you to define an extension point as internal and maybe give it some “friends” that wouldn’t be flagged as discouraged access to the extension point.
What does the community think? Is this something valuable for people?