Can someone explain to me the rationale behind BND's exporting api packages that a bundle doesn't have. It seems just wrong to me, it always (AFAICT) results in ClassNotFoundException
Especifically
bundle A contains com.foo.api.MyInterface
bundle B contains com.foo.impl.InterfaceImpl which implements MyInterface
So if I tell bnd to export package com.foo in bundle A he will correctly export com.foo.api, but if i tell export package com.foo in bundle B it will incorrectly export com.foo.api, so consumers of MyInterface get wired to bundle B and then at runtime get a ClassNotFoundException
Why doesn't BND guarantee that when a bundle exports a package it actually contains it??
I know that if I export com.foo.api and com.foo.impl instead of just com.foo then the problem is solved in my trivial example, but in our real system this is not really a posibility. Also, the actual question is why BND does that, not how to fix the problem. i already know workarounds to solve the problem
I have not yet worked with bnd directly but through the maven bundle plugin which should be fairly similar. What I found is that if you export a package you do not have then bnd will embed the classes of this package inside your bundle jar.
So at least when using the maven bundle plugin bundle B should have the interface embedded when the export of com.foo.api is defined. Not sure what happens when you define only the parent package as export but I would assume the same happens.
This automatic embedding can be quite useful if you want to deploy the api together with each bundle which I do not do regularly but which seems to be a kind of best practice in OSGi (for example for bundles that implement OSGi apis).