Skip to main content

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] [List Home]
[ecf-dev] RFC119 developments

Hi Folks,

It seems that the OSGi Enterprise Experts group and the rest of the OSGi organization have seen fit to declare that there will be some fairly large-scale changes in the RFC119-specified classes (i.e. the classes in the org.osgi.service.discovery and distribution packages) *after* ECF 3.0/Galileo (i.e. later this summer or fall). I myself have just recently (last Thursday) learned that this was the case...from folks that are participating face-2-face at an OSGi event going on last week.

Consequently, ECF will need to prepare ourselves and more importantly our consumers for this change (as any changes in the specified interface classes...e.g. DistributionConstants, DistributionProvider, Discovery, DiscoveredServiceTracker, etc) will ripple through our implementation code (naturally), and possibly require changes in usage by consumers (e.g. if service properties are renamed, moved, etc). I don't currently know what these changes will be (and I don't think the changes have actually been defined at this point), but it's clear from last week that such changes will likely be happening after ECF 3.0 is released.

See this bug and Thomas Watson's postings for more information:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=275494

As you can see from this bug, one way that we've agreed to 'warn' consumers about the likelihood of these changes is by marking the org.osgi.service.discovery interfaces as @deprecated, as well as marking them x:-internal (provisional). This seems to be the best way we have available to us to 'warn' consumers of RFC119 about this, without going so far as to withdraw the ECF implementation of RFC119 from our release (which we will not do).

I am personally not at all pleased with this development (as you can probably tell by the bug comments), as it means that when we introduce ECF 3.0/Galileo, that our implementation of RFC119 is almost guaranteed to be eventually broken (made non-compliant) when the specification changes. We will, of course, make updates to ECF's implementation of RFC119 available in subsequent releases of ECF as quickly as we can, but this will make life somewhat difficult for *any* consumers of RFC119 (our impl and/or anyone else's) as changes to the spec may affect consumers as well as us.

So, in any event, I wanted to update everyone on this development and let you know that we're doing what we can to address it...in order to prevent problems for our consumers and users of RFC119. If you have any questions/comments that I or other ECFers can answer/address, please ask here and/or on the above bug.

Thanks,

Scott





Back to the top