BND calculates too many imported packages

[hseeberger]

In Lift (http://liftweb.net) we use BND (well, the Maven Bundle plugin) to create OSGi bundles for the Lift modules. There is one module (lift-util) that uses joda-time and actually only imports org.joda.time.DateTime, and ...Duration. But the bundle manifest created by BND calculates not only org.joda.time as imported package, but also org.joda.time.base.

If I exclude the superfluous package "manually" the bundle will be resolved just fine => It's a bug!

[njbartlett]

Heiko, it doesn't look like a bug at all. DateTime extends BaseDateTime which is in the base package. If you use DateTime you need visibility of its parent class, of course. Likewise, Duration extends BaseDuration.

[hseeberger]

You absolutely sure?

[njbartlett]

Well, I was sure until I ran an actual test, which proved me wrong. A client can instantiate a BaseTime and even call methods on it like getChronology() or toCalendar() which only exist in the base classes. Here is the test code:

import org.joda.time.DateTime;
import org.osgi.framework.BundleActivator;
import org.osgi.framework.BundleContext;

public class Activator implements BundleActivator {
    public void start(BundleContext context) throws Exception {
        DateTime dateTime = new DateTime();
        System.out.println("Seems to work: " + dateTime.toCalendar(Locale.getDefault()));
    }
    public void stop(BundleContext context) throws Exception {
    }
}

However, the version of Bnd I'm using doesn't generate the extra import. So either the version of Bnd in Maven Bundle plugin is out of date, or there is some hidden use of the base package in your code that you have missed.

[hseeberger]

Thanks for testing!
Grep does not tell me any usage of the base package or any classes from there. And I trust grep ;-)
The Maven Bundle plugin is very outdated, Stuart is not giving much love to it ...

[pkriens]

a) I am partly to blame for Stuart's lack of love, I need to get bndlib in maven repo but I do not build with maven
b) Can this issue be closed? If not, please send me a zip with a setup that does it wrong. bnd is rarely wrong in these issues.

[hseeberger]

Hard for me to tell whether it can be closed, because I can only reproduce it with the Maven Bundle plugin. The current version of BND might or might not do it wrong: We can only tell as soon as you give some love to Maven and then Stu gives some love to the plugin.

But as I know a workaround (simply exclude the "evil" package) I can live with it => Let's close it and eventually reopen it as soon as Lift moves to SBT and bnd4sbt which of course uses a recent version of BND.