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[tycho-user] How to reference/exclude OSGi dependencies specified by MANIFEST

Hi everybody,

I am coming up with a probably unusual use case.

Context and problem:
I have plugin project which will not be used directly as an Eclipse plugin. Instead, the project is used to manage and bundle content which I intend to feed to a command line tool. To correctly setup the content, however, Eclipse is needed: configuration files need to be specified using an Xtext DSL, they contain executable Java code implementing the API of an Eclipse plugin and EMF models need to be provided.

Unfortunately, the dependencies of the command line tool and the project partly overlap. Both reference parts of EMF. Both reference the plugin offering the configuration DSL and also the API implemented by the files in my project. But in my project there are also additional OSGi dependencies which are not already present in the command line tool.

The command line tool executes the code provided by my project. Therefore, I need to put any additional dependencies on the classpath when executing the command line tool. My approach so far is, to use maven-dependency-plugin to copy all dependencies of my project (found by Tycho in the MANIFEST) to a folder and put that folder on the classpath. For some of the overlapping dependencies, however, this causes problems. It's also generally not the best idea to have the same classes multiple times on the class path.

I do not have control of the build of the command line tool. Also, it should be possible to build my own project independently, anyway.

Tycho question part:
One way of getting rid of duplicates could be to explicitly specify which of the dependencies of my project I want to copy with maven-dependency-plugin. But is there even a way to reference OSGi dependencies discovered by Tycho? I don't know what groupIds, artifactIds and versions Tycho uses for them.

Some of the dependencies are merely necessary for working with the project inside the Eclipse environment (the Xtext DSL for example). They are not needed at compile time. Is there a way to tell Tycho in advance to ignore specific OSGi dependencies mentioned in the MANIFEST? That would also speed up the process of resolving dependencies.

General question:
Any suggestions on how to improve the situation are also welcome. I realize that the whole setup is rather brittle. In a perfect world, the command line tool would probably have an OSGi-based plugin system itself and I could just feed in my own project. Or I would have to combine the build process of the command line tool and my own project. Any good alternatives?

Best regards,
Stefan John


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