[TAMAYA-236] Reconsider PropertySource ordering and getOrdinal()

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Done
• Affects Version/s: 0.2-incubating
• Fix Version/s: 0.3-incubating
• Component/s: API
• Labels: tamaya-clarifying-03 tamaya-wating-response
• Assignee: Anatole Tresch
• Reporter: Werner Keil
• Created: 02/Feb/17 18:50
• Updated: 18/Sep/17 19:35
• Resolved: 05/Mar/17 23:36

Description

As marked TODO rethink whole default PropertySources and ordering in PropertySource we should reconsider the whole getOrdinal() method.

The Chief Architect of Lightbend, key contributor to Typesafe Config mentioned in a Microprofile discussion about ordinals, that he's

unconvinced that the use of ordinals is a preferred solution for the problem at hand—it just ends up becoming magic numbers which sadly are not absolutely ordered. It is also extremely finicky since a change in an ordinal by a third party will lead to surprising effects downstream, most specifically for config value overloads.
A deterministic, absolute, order at declaration site means that the >consumer is always in control and order cannot change due to the whims of third-party libraries.

We may take a look at how e.g. Typesafe Config (and others like Apache Commons Config) handle this, but I am not aware either of them use the concept of an "ordinal" or "order" to solve this problem.