[ecf-dev] RFC119 developments

[Scott Lewis <slewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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