| Re: [e4-dev] Re-exporting Require-Bundle |
Eike Stepper wrote on 06/12/2009 11:29:09 AM:
> I completely agree that in all cases where dependencies are not
> exposed in an API they should *not* be re-exported.
I recommend *not* re-exporting required bundles *even* in cases where types from those bundles show up in your bundle's API.
Apart from the maintenance problem of having to mirror version number changes of bundles you require, you will only ever grow the number and size of required "stuff" that your bundle depends on. For example, in the olden days, org.eclipse.core.runtime was the bundle that contained the ubiquitous types IProgressMonitor and IStatus. These types do appear in the API of JFace, but JFace did not re-export org.eclipse.core.runtime. When at some later point the bundle was split, JFace only required org.eclipse.equinox.common, a subset of org.eclipse.core.runtime. For those who write SWT/JFace stand-alone applications, this makes a big difference, 100K for equinox.common vs. 1871K for core.runtime and all its dependencies.
Boris