Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
I assume that what we really need is two kinds of component export,
the public app level API (java.util.*) and a public-yet-not-for-app-
but-fellow-traveler API, such as what other conspiring modules would
export to each other to provide the full public API.
Kinda like "friend API" w/o the horror of having to declare who your
friends are...
You can achieve this sort of effect with some of the new constructs
proposed for OSGi R4, since you can include/exclude classes from
exported packages and then use mandatory attributes to restrict
visibility. It is probably not the cleanest way of doing this, but it
does work.
Sure - Can we also version the supported public-for-friend API in
some way? (I need to go read the OSGi spec...)
No, there is only one package version. So, if they have the same package
name, then they can only have one version. If you want multiple
versions, then you have to have multiple separate packages. There are
some ways to cheat on this perhaps, since a package can be exported
multiple times, but it would be ugly.
Perhaps what OSGi needs is general version attribute support, so that
people can attach arbitrary version attributes for this type of thing.
Or better yet, a general dependency model. All of this, however, would
start to greatly complicate the framework implementation.
-> richard
