Tycho and Sigil both look promising, bit IMO are too immature at this stage for production/enterprise work.
After working with this stuff for awhile, it's really not as bad as I first thought. Coming from developing Eclipse plugins for the last 4-5 years, we too were accustomed to the PDE/Eclipse way of doing things. I have to say though, breaking out of the PDE mindset has actually been quite liberating. We currently use Bundlor from the Spring DM project to generate our manifests, although we are investigating switching to the Felix BND plugin since we are migrating from DM Server to an embedded Felix framework. What we do is just treat the manifest as a generated resource, i.e. it's always generated from the build and never even checked into subversion. We also have Bundlor configured to copy the manifest to the src/main/resources/META-INF directory for use within Eclipse (just remember to add MANIFEST.MF to the Ignored Resources for version control). The Bundlor plugin does a nice job of finding all the dependencies and generating the correct Import/Export Package entries in the manifest. I rarely have to override it to force it to add an import. From what I've read, all of this is possible using the BND plugin as well, but we're still evaluating to decide which one to go with for this next iteration of our project. While developing, it's possible to regenerate the manifest from within Eclipse if you are using the Spring Tools, although I usually encourage my developers to just run a maven build instead - that way you also update the manifests of other plugins that might have been affected. I think one benefit of this approach is that it forces you to think a little bit more about what you are doing, rather than just having an IDE generate everything for you. The learning curve is a little steeper, but in the end you'll be able to solve problems a lot quicker because you know how everything is supposed to work. On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 3:29 AM, Jochen Mader <[email protected]>wrote: > Thanks for all the suggestions. > The maven-bundle-plugin is what I am using right now but it only provides > means of creating and maintaining an OSGi infrastructure, not reausing the > meat information from OSGi, which is what I am looking for. > Both Tycho and Sigil look very promising but for my scenario they both have > the same problem: > Missing maven 2 integration (Tycho only works with maven 3 and even ships > it > with the downloadable). > I am working in the enterprise area and things there are moving at glacial > speed. > We will be stuck with maven 2 for quite some time and if I want to get OSGi > into our projects I will have to integrate everything with the existing > architecture which is maven 2 + hudson. > > CU > > Jochen >
