Hi, I've noticed that the annotations from org.apache.felix.scr.annotations are declared with @Retention(RetentionPolicy.SOURCE) . I think the following use cases would benefit from the annotations being available at runtime .
1. Configuring component instances outside a OSGi container I often develop components which I want to test in plain JUnit tests rather than in a container. These components have references which I need to satisfy in order for the unit test to run. Since the annotations are available only in the source file, I am unable to inspect the declared references and inject them in a generic manner. The alternative is to manually configure each reference, but that gets tedious pretty fast. 2. Processing SCR annotations in a JSR-269 annotation processor Having the annotations available to the processor ( strictly speaking only RetentionPolicy.CLASS is required ) would allow much simpler integration of SCR processing since the processor would only need to be available as a JAR on the compile classpath, rather than a separate maven plugin invocation or explicit ant task call. Above the other two use cases, having annotations at runtime can generally ease integration with other systems which can inspect the component configuration at runtime. The single downside that I see is that the annotations will increase the file size of the deployed bundles ( although I don't think it will be a huge increase ). I'm willing to prepare a patch, but would like your opinion first. Thanks, Robert
