Following some dev list discussion, proposal is to change
http://felix.apache.org/documentation/development/provisional-osgi-api-policy.html
to this (markdown source):
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The OSGi Alliance exposes provisional API that may or may not become part of
future OSGI specifications. This policy explains how and when Felix
subprojects may relate to such API. Provisional OSGi API refers to anything in
the `org.osgi.*` package namespace that is not part of a final released
specification.
## Policy
1. No Felix release may contain or refer to provisional OSGI API.
1. Provisional API may be included and used in unreleased source code, however
the API must be part of a final released OSGI specification before this Felix
source may be released.
1. Although it is STRONGLY NOT RECOMMENDED, modified versions of provisional
api may be released with these modifications:
1. Any provisional OSGi API must be recreated in the `org.apache.felix.*`
package name space; this effectively makes it provisional Felix API.
1. All Felix provisional API must be marked as deprecated.
1. All Felix provisional API exported from bundles should be exported with a
mandatory attribute of `status="provisional"`.
## Discussion
The first goal of this policy is to completely avoid using provisional OSGi API
in released Felix projects given the potential confusion and questions by doing
so. The second goal is to make the existence of any released Felix provisional
API completely obvious to downstream users and make it difficult for them to
use it unknowingly. However, any such release is likely to involve numerous
problems such as incorrect semantic versioning or version mismatch between the
provisional and eventual OSGI release and bundle version inflation if the Felix
provisional api is removed after the OSGI API is released.
As an example, to provisionally export the `org.apache.felix.service.metatype`
package, the
`Export-Package` statement would look something like this:
:::xml
<Export-Package>
org.apache.felix.service.metatype; version="0.1"; mandatory="status";
status="provisional"
</Export-Package>
When working with new OSGI specifications, constructing a Felix provisional API
will likely result in parallel package structures between the provisional OSGi
and Felix APIs. When working with existing specifications, it may be necessary
to create extensions to existing OSGi interfaces in the Felix package namespace.
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+1 [ ] Adopt this replacement text
-1 [ ] Keep the existing text
0 [ ] Don't care
Vote open for 72 hours or until I can get enough people to vote :-)
thanks
david jencks
