Re: Maven for Felix

[Enrique Rodriguez <en...@gmail.com>]

On 2/21/06, Rinku <ra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have not followed the Felix's Maven-OSGi plugin for a quite some time
> now. Wondering (if and) how usable is it for Eclipse Plugin/RCP
> development since plugins are essentially OSGi bundles?

The plugin is not at all useful for Eclipse development; it's not
designed to be and I personally don't intend to take it in that
direction.  If you (and your entire development team) are standardized
on Eclipse, which I would assume if you are developing for Eclipse
RCP, then you are better off using the fine tooling in Eclipse.

The Felix M2 Plugin knows how to convert a project in the standard
on-disk M2 layout and package it into a bundle, with some rudimentary
support for deriving some of the OSGi manifest entries.  IMO, the
benefit of the plugin is to extend the M2 benefit of having POM
metadata and now OSGi bundle metadata together in one place, namely
the M2 pom.xml.

Further, the Felix M2 Plugin helps with IDE independence, for example
the ability to use Eclipse and IntelliJ on the same project team, as
is common on OSS projects ... with the caveat, of course, that you
have simply moved what you are standardizing on from an IDE to a build
tool.

> Is more work forthcoming on these lines? There was some discussion on
> the Maven mailing list about coordinating with Eclipse PDE team but I
> haven't run into any more updates on this.

I can't speak for general Maven team - Eclipse team coordination and
this is the wrong mailing list for that.  But, as for the plugin
maintained here, there is no additional Eclipse support planned.  At
most, on an as-requested/as-needed basis we'll add better support for
OSGi R4 manifest entries.

Enrique