I did an experiment where I configered the maven POM for one of our
Eclipse plugins to let maven's eclipse:eclipse update the PDE Manifest.
However, I found a "bug" in how it treated -SNAPSHOT - it turned
2.3.0.incubating-SNAPSHOT in the maven version into a Manifest entry
2.3.0.incubating.SNAPSHOT (changed the '-' to a '.')
When I posted a patch to the maven-eclipse-plugin to fix this, I
commented that the thing I patched was Deprecated. I got a quick reply
saying it was, indeed deprecated - we should be using some OSGi tooling
from Apache Felix.
The comment on the Maven list says:
you should look into the Apache Felix bundle plugin. It has a
bundle:manifest goal that will generate the OSGi manifest, that's why
the eclipse pluign class is deprecated
Check "Adding OSGi metadata to existing projects without changing the
packaging type"
http://felix.apache.org/site/maven-bundle-plugin-bnd.html
It looks like the tooling for generating OSGi bundles has advanced quite
far, and may solve many of the difficulties we've had in building these
kinds of things. Among the things it apparently can be configured to
handle is our "library" plugin, containing jars from other places. I'll
going to try and see if we can make this all work for our projects. If
anyone else has insights, please post :-).
-Marshall
