Folks, I agree with the direction that this discussion is taking.
It seems right to add the OSGi metatdata to the 3rd party JARs. Yours, Mike. Graham Charters wrote:
FWIW, I agree with Sebastien and Rajini. I don't believe it's a coincidence that both SpringSource and ServiceMix went the route of adding manifests to the thirdparty jars. It keeps things simple and gives a better experience from an OSGi perspective. If we're serious about supporting OSGi we should try to do the right thing by the technology. Whilst not necessarily an argument against virtual bundles, I also agree that we should have properly authored dependencies. This view is supported by the discussion Rajini is having in Jira 2343. I know for a fact that SpringSource work very hard to ensure the version ranges on their dependencies are sensible (e.g. match the rules governing version increments for each project). I don't believe we can completely do away with virtual bundles in the short term, but we should only use them where necessary (e.g for signed jars and jars which require code extensions to function in OSGi). Regards, Graham.