ReplaceOperation can no longer be accessed outside from spring package [DATAREST-1151]

Christian Mayr opened DATAREST-1151 and commented

In my Spring Boot application I'm using org.springframework.data.rest.webmvc.json.patch.ReplaceOperation for creating a custom PATCH-operation, e.g.

public static Patch convertRequestToPatch(ServletServerHttpRequest request) {
    ObjectMapper objectMapper = new ObjectMapper();
    try {
        InputStream inputStream = new IncomingRequest(request).getBody();
        JsonNode requestJson = objectMapper.readTree(inputStream);
        Iterator<Entry<String, JsonNode>> fields = requestJson.fields();
        List<PatchOperation> patchOperations = new ArrayList<>();
        while (fields.hasNext()) {
            Entry<String, JsonNode> entry = fields.next();
            patchOperations.add(new ReplaceOperation(entry.getKey(), entry.getValue().asText()));
        }

        return new Patch(patchOperations);
    } catch (IOException e) {
        throw new UncheckedIOException(e);
    }
}

which was working like a charm till Spring Boot 1.5.7, but with the recent 1.5.8 release the build is failing with

org.springframework.data.rest.webmvc.json.patch.ReplaceOperation is not public in org.springframework.data.rest.webmvc.json.patch; cannot be accessed from outside package

Any reasons on why the ReplaceOperation is no longer public? Is there a new best practice for my task?

Affects: 3.0 GA (Kay)