On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 5:19 AM, Christian Schneider <[email protected]> wrote: > One nice thing about the feature files we currently use is that they are > globally adressable using a maven coordinate. So by support reading features > we could create a very small distro that can read all it needs from maven > repos. If maven access is not allowed/possible in an environment we can > nicely use our system dir to make karaf fully self contained. > > So feature reading would allow us to have a fixed small binary distro that > can easily be customized by users. They can already change the feature set > they want and with startup feature loading they could also customize the > startup feature without build their own distro. We could extend that to some > commands that allow reading features into the system dir. So the user could > download a small karaf binary, execute some commands at a place with maven > repo access and as a result get a customized distro he can then use in a > closed company environment. This would be much simpler then building your > own distro with maven like you have to do it now.
>From the perspective of karaf's feature, this is a big plus for us since we deliver karaf to our client in a isolated environment. > > Honestly the above thing would also work nicely without loading startup > bundles from a feature file. I doubt anyway that people really need to > change the framework bundles. > > Supporting the subsystem spec sounds great to me. So that may be a good > reason to delay supporting feature reading and then only support it for the > subsystem spec features. Any way the startup feature loading from xml is not > that big of an issue for me. I thought it is a nice feature but it is not > really crucial. > > Now to the last part about maven support in karaf. I think at the moment > maven support is a key feature in karaf that makes it much easier to use > than other frameworks. It allows to install big frameworks like camel and > cxf with just some simple commands. Whenever I show this to people who do > not know karaf they are really impressed by it. So while I am sure that > maven is not ideal for OSGi bundles it is the best we currently have. > > I fully support replacing maven with something better like obr but only when > it is ready. So the key to that would be that all relevant bundles are > available in OBRs. We then also would need a url for adressing bundles from > OBRs (not sure if we have such a thing already). So replacing maven sounds > like a good goal for the future but not near term. Perhaps in the end maven > and OBR grow together anyway and the big maven repos simply additionally > support OBR. So you would address the entry points into the OBR as maven > coordinates and resolve dependencies using the OBR features. > > Christian > > P.S. Thanks for your nice words about my contributions to karaf. I really > like Karaf and see a great future for it. So I guess I just have to learn to > step on less toes on the way :-) > > Am 02.06.2012 19:26, schrieb David Jencks: > >> Hi Christian, >> >> I'm not a big fan of xml when dealing with not-very-complicated data. The >> data in startup.properties is just about the right complexity for a >> properties file. A feature repo is too much: it can contain more than one >> feature, and the name of the startup feature has to be hard coded. >> >> Furthermore, now that the subsystem spec is fairly final I think we should >> look towards using spec features as much as possible and start thinking of >> karaf features as possibly obsolete. Pushing the karaf feature xml format >> into the framework startup is exactly opposite of this goal. >> >> I looked back and reviewed your patch. Mostly I'm impressed with how much >> you've contributed in the last few months :-) I wish I had as much time to >> spend on karaf.... Your patch is indeed pretty simple and small but my >> objections are really to the idea of using xml during startup rather than >> the implementation. I might have missed it but didn't think you addressed >> the question of why xml was better than a properties file. >> >> My views might not be shared by many others, for instance I really think >> we should try hard to make karaf runtime independent of maven including the >> mvn url handler, and I'm not sure anyone else agrees with me. >> >> thanks >> david jencks >> >> >> On Jun 2, 2012, at 2:17 AM, Christian Schneider wrote: >> > > -- > > Christian Schneider > http://www.liquid-reality.de > > Open Source Architect > Talend Application Integration Division http://www.talend.com >
