I agree with the sentiments of both sides on this. Basically, this is a
necessary (and perhaps transient) evil. The Eclipse community is in the
process of creating the "Orbit" project
(http://eclipse.org/proposals/orbit/). The project will likely be created
next week. Orbit's main mission is to be a repository of bundles
containing third party libraries that are approved for use in Eclipse
projects. If these libs are already bundles, great, Orbit will just track
them for convenience and efficiency. If they are not bundles, Orbit
committers will create bundles and maintain them.
I mention Orbit here because it would be swell if we worked together to
come up with some bundling guidelines and best practices. Without seeking
to start the technical discussion here in this thread, I am thinking of
issues like
- bundle symbolic name conventions
- version numbering
- use of nested jars
- bundling libraries that are actually multiple jars (i.e., is the
rule one bundle per JAR)
- ...
Various Eclipse projects have been bundling libraries for some years now.
Some libs are bundled repeatedly by different projects and in divergent
ways. We are very much in need of a common understanding of the issues
and approaches within our community. Further, it would be goofy and
confusing for the OSGi community for us to bundle commons-logging
(whatever) one way and Felix to do it another.
Anyway, this message is more to raise awareness that there are others in
the same boat and on the same river.
Jeff
"Richard S. Hall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
08/08/2006 10:24 PM
Please respond to
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Subject
[RESULT] Re: [VOTE] Felix Commons Initiative
Time to call this vote on the Felix Commons initiative, here are the
results:
* +1 votes - Humberto Cervantes, Richard S. Hall, Karl Pauls,
Francesco Furfari, Manuel Santillan, Enrique Rodriguez, Marcel
Offermans, John E. Conlon, and Rob Walker.
* 0 votes - None.
* -1 votes - BJ Hargrave and Niclas Hedhman.
All binding votes were +1, so I guess the vote passes.
The main concern expressed by the -1 votes was that of the desire to
educate/encourage other communities to include OSGi headers in their JAR
files without us having to maintain separate bundle-ized versions.
However, this is not an either-or proposition, since the goal is to do
both...the mere act of creating separate bundle-ized versions educates
the original community that there is a need and desire. Additionally, it
may be the case that some communities will never support OSGi headers.
Ultimately, we all hope that the need for Felix Commons eventually
disappears in the future when every community adopts OSGi headers, but
until then we have a two-pronged approach: 1) enable sharing of
bundle-ized JARs to stop duplication of effort and 2) educate/encourage
communities to take over the bundle-izing of their own JARs.
-> richard
Richard S. Hall wrote:
> We need to vote on the Felix Commons initiative proposed by Enrique a
> little while back so that we can either start putting the idea into
> action or forget about it. To quote Enrique about the proposal:
>
> "As OSGi developers, many of us are faced with the need to 'bundlize'
> library jars; that is, to maintain 3rd party libraries re-packaged as
> OSGi bundles. Maintaining these jars results in a duplication of
> effort and it doesn't address the fact that many of us would like to
> see 3rd party library projects directly produce OSGi bundles.
> Therefore, we'd like to start an initiative at Felix to provide a
> 'commons' for bundlized jars."
>
> [ ] +1 Accept the proposal.
> [ ] 0 I don't care.
> [ ] -1 Reject the proposal.
>
>
>
