Re: [e4-dev] Re-exporting Require-Bundle

[Thomas Watson <tjwatson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> I do buy the argument that you must re-export a complete bundle in cases ...

I meant to say ...

I do NOT buy the argument that you must re-export a complete bundle in cases where you have API which uses types in method signatures from another bundle.

Tom



Thomas Watson---06/12/2009 09:09:36 AM---> From:

From:	Thomas Watson/Austin/IBM@IBMUS
To:	E4 Project developer mailing list <e4-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date:	06/12/2009 09:09 AM
Subject:	Re: [e4-dev] Re-exporting Require-Bundle

---

> From:
> 
> Eike Stepper <stepper@xxxxxxxxxx>

> I must have misunderstood something in your argument. If you really have
> this problem, then you must either:
> 
> A) never have needed this re-export, i.e. you only used the dependency
> internally but nevertheless re-exported it. Unlikely :P
> B) have changed your own API anyway to be able to get rid of the
> dependency. In this case I doubt that clients would mind that you
> cleanup your API (including remove of unneeded dependencies) completely.
> 
> Cheers
> /Eike
> 

I do buy the argument that you must re-export a complete bundle in cases where you have API which uses types in method signatures from another bundle.  Clients of your API may only use types and methods from the package which do not require these extraneous types.  Why force every client of your API to get bound to this other extraneous bundle if they never need to load any types from that bundle?  Now if the client is actually going to call a method that requires an extraneous type then the client must have some dependency on the other API.  IMHO that client should bare the burden of specifying this requirement.  After all they are actually using the other API which your bundle does not own.  We should not bury the requirement within some re-export inherited from another bundle that is required.  This leads to endless confusion when trying to figure out what packages are actually visible to a particular bundle.

Tom_______________________________________________
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