Hi guys,
Using the felix-maven-plugin for Spring/OSGi released, I discovered
several 'unwanted' and missing features. I'm not sure whether they
belong to the bnd jar or the maven plugin.
1. Extra manifest entries
I've discovered that when a MANIFEST.MF is available inside the project,
it's entries are copied to generated manifest. I find this useful since
it allows me to specify Dynamic imports.
However, I've found that if Include resources is used, this doesn't work
any more.
What's the official, supported way of working with it?
2. Defaults/empty properties
Inside our project, we use a lot of properties so that submodules can
customize the plugin w/o redefining it again. However, it's impossible
to 'erase'/reset settings to their defaults.
<properties> <myImportPackage>package</myImportPackage> </properties>
...
<Import-Package>${myImportPackage}</Import-Package>
If a submodule erases myImportPackage:
<myImportPackage></myImportPackage>
then a NPE is thrown by bnd tool. It would be nice if null & empty
strings should be considered defaults.
3. Include and -
Bnd tool allow include to specify several files and allows a - to
indicate that it's okay if the file is missing. However, the maven
plugin doesn't like that, it will complain if the file is missing.
<_include>-missing/file.txt</_include>
4. Import versions
The import versions are determined automatically and can't be
overridden. For example inside Spring/OSGi, we import spring 2.0.5 and
the resulting imports have version 2.0.
We want to be more specific such as 2.0.5 or [2.0.5, 2.1) but whatever I
specify as import package is completely ignored.
5. Import-Resource
Besides allowing it to work alongside 1), it would be nice if the
resources found inside the classpath could be copied automatically. This
might be difficult, I realize, but at least some patterns might be used.
I'll add also the ability to use the filtered/processed resource and not
the 'raw' one (see the 'resource filtering and bundle packaging' email
sent 2 days ago to the list).
Thanks and looking forward to a new version of the plugin.
It took a while to get it into our project but I think it was worth it.
Too bad Maven made the task way more difficult then it had to be.
Cheers,
--
Costin
