Re: maven / osgi / repositories

[lukewpatterson <lu...@gmail.com>]

Jason van Zyl-5 wrote:
> 
> 
> On 27-Jan-09, at 6:41 PM, Barrie Treloar wrote:
> 
>>> repositories. They might become OBRs at some point when OSGi becomes
>>> more "mainstream".
>>
>> One thing I have been toying with for a while is to auto-magically
>> extend maven-jar-plugin to add the OSGi headers.
>>
> 
> I really don't think this is a great idea. I think for a bundle to be  
> useful someone needs to provide proper imports and exports.
> 
>> I haven't given a lot of thought into what I need to do, but if I
>> recall correctly, getting a simple OSGified jar isn't much work and if
>> Maven did this out of the box then the maven repository would become
>> OSGified over time as projects release their artifacts.
>>
> 
> We've toyed around with this idea, but if you want something useful I  
> think it's really hard to infer something useful. Making a manifest  
> that is workable with OSGi is not that hard and the author of a  
> package is probably the person to do it. I think what we can do is  
> give a brief guideline as to what's commonly expected and help people  
> create correct and useful bundles. Maven central is the biggest bundle  
> repository in waiting :-)
> 
> 

I'm sure my views aren't unique, and I'm probably rehashing what someone
else already said, but here goes:

When you see that a dependency isn't OSGi-ified, first put yourself in the
shoes of its authors, and consider the possible reasons:

* "No one has requested OSGi-ification."  This is pretty common.  The
author's don't even know that there is a demand because no one asked.  Even
if there is no time to wait on the authors and you have to custom-deploy a
wrapped-version, at least file a bug to get the ball rolling.

* "It's just a packaging concern, you can download a wrapped bundle from
www.blah......"  The Maven community has the most to lose from this approach
to OSGi-ification.  This wreaks havoc with the coordinate system.  Sometimes
the authors don't even know that others (1..*) have published wrapped
versions of their jars.  The dependency authors should be made aware that
these workarounds do not serve the Maven+OSGi community well.

* "We would add it, but how could we test it and maintain it?"  This is very
common too and I don't think there is an easy answer yet.  Much of the
testing infrastructure isn't even OSGi-ified yet.


When filing requests for OSGi-ification, it would be nice if I could direct
the dependency authors to a site/mailing-list where all their
OSGi-ification/Maven-alignment questions could be answered.  Does such a
resource exist?

I recently filed a request with Mockito, please take a look and let me know
if I should have done anything differently:
http://code.google.com/p/mockito/issues/detail?id=67
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