I'm working on a project which is being used by a number of people I don't know. We've done a fairly good job of bringing down the CheckStyle warnings and the thing is about a low as its going to get without breaking binary compatibility.
The majority of the remaining warnings are caused by constants (public static final) missing the final keyword. The naming of the constants makes it clear that the developer intended them to be read only, but they simply didn't have final defined on them.
Unless a developer was writing some pretty terrible code that made use of this oversight, their code won't break if we add them.
Currently the version number is 1.2.1. Would you apply the change and go to 2.0, or apply it and roll it out as 1.3. Seems like a pretty small change to require a full 2.0.
What should I do?
I'm sure you already know this, but I suspect it has to come down to "is this a safe/simple/no-worry" upgrade?
I think it also depends on how close you are to the next major version release. If it's soon, don't risk a problematic point release. You can always do a safe point release and an alpha major release, but this might be odd if the next major release was way out in the future...