[oscar-devel] Another OBR issue

[Richard S. H. <he...@un...>]

I was planning on having the next version of OBR support updating, so 
you can automatically update installed bundles. There is a difficult 
with this approach in knowing which locally installed bundles correspond 
to the remotely available bundles.

One might initially assume that you could use the URL (i.e., location) 
to determine a correspondence, but this is not always true. For example, 
bundles that are installed locally, such as the shell or OBR, have a URL 
like "file:bundle/shell.jar", whereas the URL on OBR will be something 
like "http://oscar-osgi.sf.net/br/shell.jar". Thus, it is not possible 
to use the location to determine the correspondence between local and 
remote bundles.

The other possibility is to use bundle name. Currently, OBR assumes 
bundle names are unique, so this would work. However, for various 
reasons people may not want bundle names to be unique. For example, 
maybe someone wants to package two different versions of their bundle, 
one with native libraries for windows and one with native libraries for 
linux. In this case, they may want the name to be the same. I don't 
know. Since the bundle name is meant to be human readable, there may be 
valid reasons.

Regardless, we have to have some unique identifier for OBR. It seems 
like there are two options:

   1. Require that bundle names are always unique and just be done with it.
   2. Add a new "OBR unique name" manifest entry to all bundles hosted
      in OBR.

Some opinions would be appreciated...

-> richard