APIs stability

APIs inside LISA are split between private and public ones:

• Public APIs can be expected to stay stable, or undergo a deprecation cycle where they will trigger an DeprecationWarning and be documented as such before being removed. Exceptions to that rule are documented explicitly as such.

• Private APIs can be changed at all points.

Public APIs consist of classes and functions with names not starting with an underscore, defined in modules with a name not starting with an underscore (or any of its parent modules or containing class).

Everything else is private.

Note

User subclassing is usually more at risk of breakage than other uses of the APIs. Behaviors are usually not restricted to a single method, which means the subclass would have to override multiple of them to preserve important API laws. This is unfortunately not future-proof, as new versions can add new methods that would also require being overridden and kept in sync. If for some reason subclassing is required, please get in touch in the GitLab issue tracker before relying on that for production.

Note

Instance attributes are considered public following the same convention as functions and classes. Only reading from them is expected in user code though, any attempt to modify or delete them is outside of the bounds of what the public API exposes (unless stated explicitly otherwise). This means that a minor version change could swap an instance attribute for a read-only property. It also means that any problem following the modification of an attribute by a user will not be considered as a bug.