currently, bundles with Sling-Initial-Content have not special support in the feature model tooling and when used with composite nodestore. however, they work just fine e.g. in AEMaaCS because during the image build phase the contained content gets extracted and baked into the docker image. at runtime, the Sling JCR content loader produces a warning about the locked down /apps folder which can be ignored, because the content is already there and does not need to be extracted again. however, it's probably currently working only due to "lucky circumstances" in the current process of cloud build pipeline.
the sling-feature-analyzer [1] is currently looking out for bundles with Sling-Initial-Content and produce a warning if it founds any. Sling-Initial-Content is around for years and i would like to make bundles with it "first-class citizens" in the world of feature models and composite node stores. Without having looked into details of the current feature model toolchain a "full support" might look like this: 1. the sling-feature-analyzer should be changed to accept bundles with Sling-Initial-Content in general, but check the configured path to make sure they point only to immutable areas in the repository. 2. in the feature-cpconverter [2] could be extended to detect bundles with Sling-Initial-Content and probably convert the contained content to a content package and include it in the feature model for further processing. WDYT? stefan [1] https://github.com/apache/sling-org-apache-sling-feature-analyser/ [2] https://github.com/apache/sling-org-apache-sling-feature-cpconverter
