Major Description
Spinoff from LUCENE-3454 where Shai noted this inconsistency.
IR.reopen sounds like an unconditional operation, which has trapped users in the past into always closing the old reader instead of only closing it if the returned reader is new.
I think this hidden maybe-ness is trappy and we should rename it (maybeReopen? reopenIfNeeded?).
In addition, instead of returning "this" when the reopen didn't happen, I think we should return null to enforce proper usage of the maybe-ness of this API.