I understand that the OSGi alliance would not release an unfinished spec .. but I think it would not need to.
What I propose instead is that the alliance develops specs like we develop open source software. The spec could be defined in a maven project on github. There would be a daily build of the spec to a maven snapshot repo. When a spec version is finalized there would be a version tag and a release build to maven central. This would allow several positive things: 1. People could look into the current state of the spec and propose changes in form of pull requests 2. Implementors and users of the spec could do daily builds against the snapshots and this way be notifed of changes quickly. This would speed up the feedback cycle in regard to usability of the spec. 3. As the spec would be published by the alliance no third party would need to first time release the spec 4. When there is need the alliance could also release beta versions of a spec like 0.9.0. So implementors could base a release on a fixed version to produce there own milstone of beta releases. I know that such a change would be difficult to achieve in the alliance but I think it would be worth the effort. Christian
The OSGi Alliance has never released API with version <1 and I think it never will. This means that any API with version <1 that would be in Felix provisional release would never clash with a released OSGi API. AFAIK OSGi has never made a statement about the Felix release policy but I guess it might be possible to try and get a statement from OSGi that it will never release versions <1 and that implementation projects are allowed to use versions 0.x during the initial creation of an implementation of a new, previously unreleased spec. I can take this up to the OSGi folks and see if I can get a statement like that... Cheers, David
-- Christian Schneider http://www.liquid-reality.de Open Source Architect http://www.talend.com
