Hi Scott,
Unfortunately the feature is not maven based which makes it very
difficult to work with in any production environment. The problem is
that all the bundle urls point to a remote http site that is not
reachable for typical production system.
All of the http urls are publicly available...these aren't typically
reachable?
I should have explained this a bit better. The problem is that
production systems and sometimes even the development teams often do not
have access to download jars from the internet. So they need some way to
mirror the needed resources in house. Most such companies now already
have a company maven repo which either acts as a proxy to the outside
world or can be populated manually.
If you construct your feature using maven urls then it works out of the
box in such environments as you can simply configure karaf or maven for
the build to use the company maven repo.
Currently the ecf feature contains absolute http urls which would be
different if the user stores the p2 repo somewhere locally. So each of
these urls would have to be changed in this case.
While maven is one solution to this problem we might also be able to
provide a quicker solution. Maybe we can work out a way to use relative
urls in the feature and resolve them using the place of the feature.xml
as kind of anchor.
This could then also allow people to mirror the p2 repo locally.
I think ecf could be a really big thing for karaf if you could deploy
the ecf bundles and feature file to a maven repo (ideally maven
central).
Sigh. Short story: I would like to do this (consistently for all
versions/releases), but it's somewhat problematic.
Longer: First, ECF does produce a maven repo for all of our bundles
(see [1] toward bottom of page).
Two problems though:
1) A few dependencies are not in maven central (e.g. Orbit bundles),
and we can't tell those projects what to do wrt maven.
A lot of the projects orbit provides are already present as maven
bundles in central now. We can provide missing bundles through
servicemix bundles. This is how we get the missing bundles for karaf.
We can help you if you need some project wrapped as a bundle. I am not
sure how well this would match the tycho based builds at eclipse.
2) We/ECF don't currently have any access to publish to maven
central. I would have no objection to doing so though, so if someone
can make this available or explain how to do so, I'm willing.
Then there is this bug [2]. As you can see, more projects (like ECF)
are moving toward maven distribution, but some of the
org-and-project-level issues are a little tricky.
That looks good. So maybe it would even be solved over time. I will try
to help with this. I hope I find some time soon to get more familiar
with ecf.
In any case I really appreciate your efforts to bring ecf to karaf.
Christian
