I have had the same experience as Milen and Christian but I think I come to a different conclusion. I originally came to karaf because of the easy entrance into OSGI and we have a Maven build process that I could not move from. I think many other people come to karaf for those same reasons. Here is a conversation I had the other day where karaf was primarily being used for its build process and its tight integration of maven with features https://groups.google.com/a/saiku.meteorite.bi/forum/#!topic/dev/4uiWj1g2EU0 I think even bnd is getting away from having to put things inside of the bnd file and making sure you can configure osgi in other ways (Example would be making classes ending in impl private and using annotations to determine exports and imports through references. Even those elements you discussed previously such as runtime properties and system packages are more for the bndrun files so that bndtools can package and launch appropriately. I generally keep them out of the bnd file and let maven handle those elements for my project. If you want to maintain a bndrun file to test and use with bndtools that is different than requireing a bnd file. My general feeling is that almost nothing will need to go into the .bnd file soon (See this conversation https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/bndtools-users/yV_B5B1cU3k) so karaf should not require users to understand what it is. I think it will be optional soon enough so it is better not to require it now. On the other hand if developers like bnd tools then let them include an optional bndrun file that they are responsible for maintaining. I think with java 9 alot of people will come to OSGI for the tooling and it will be important to ease them into the OSGI build process as simply as possible.
On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 6:28 AM, Christian Schneider < ch...@die-schneider.net> wrote: > On 12.02.2016 11:46, Milen Dyankov wrote: > >> For the record (in case you find some public evidence of me arguing the >> opposite) some time ago I was totally against using bnd.bnd files. After >> being kind of forced to do it for a while, I realized it doesn't really >> make any difference in the effort that it takes to maintain those and at >> the same time provides clearer separation of concerns. So I changed my >> mind >> :) ! >> > Interestingly I have the same experience. I first hit bnd.bnd files in > some pax projects and thought they were a strange way to configure the OSGi > setup. So at this time I was also rather against it. The more I worked on > it in pax and also while I did some experiments in bndtools the more I > liked the > style of bnd files. At some point then I migrated the Aries JPA project to > it and I really like the result. > > Christian > > > -- > Christian Schneider > http://www.liquid-reality.de > > Open Source Architect > http://www.talend.com > >
