Hi all, As most would have noticed, OSGi has moved to the Eclipse Foundation [1] and all the future OSGi specification work will happen there [2].
The Converter that's in the Felix codebase is an implementation of the OSGi Converter specification [3]. As Converter is a 'util' specification, OSGi also provides an implementation with the API. There could be other implementations as well, this is similar to what is done with Push Streams and the Service Tracker. The initial implementation of the Converter Util at OSGi was based on the same codebase as the Converter at Felix. In effect it's a fork. Over time the two forks have started to diverge a little, mostly due to different fixes being applied to both of them. Now that OSGi is an Eclipse project and all of the OSGi technology at Eclipse is developed as ordinary opensource projects with the ASL2 license I think it would be good if we could collapse these 2 forks into one again. Because the Converter is the implementation shipped by OSGi as part of its spec API (into [4]), we can't really remove the implementation from the OSGi codebase. So I would like to discuss removing the Converter from the Felix codebase, so that the codebase can live on in a single location which would be: https://github.com/osgi/osgi/tree/main/org.osgi.util.converter/src/org/osgi/util/converter Obviously this would mean to consolidate all the bugfixes that went into its Felix codebase into the combined one. Combining the codebases into one would mean that all users get the benefit from work done to the implementation by both communities. I hope that the Felix community would be open to this. Best regards, David Bosschaert [1] https://newsroom.eclipse.org/news/announcements/osgi-alliance-transfers-governance-osgi-specifications-open-source-software [2] https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/technology.osgi [3] https://docs.osgi.org/specification/osgi.cmpn/7.0.0/util.converter.html [4] https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/osgi/org.osgi.util.converter/
