-provider-policy VERSION-MASK

Project

The -provider-policy instruction defines the semantic versioning policy to be used when a type is a provider. A provider is in general a type that is implemented by classes that are responsible for the contract implied by the package. In contrast, a consumer is the party that just uses the contract defined in the package. For example, when you implement Event Admin, the org.osgi.service.event package is your responsibility so the types you need to implement like EventAdmin are provider types. (These types are annotated with a @ProviderType annotation.) A casual user of the Event Admin service will be a consumer, the EventHandler type is therefore annotated with a@ConsumerType.

The purpose of this distinction is semantic versioning. It turns out that the relation between a consumer and a provider is not symmetric. A provider is tightly bound to a contract while a consumer is expected to have backward compatibility. Virtually any change to the contract requires the provider to adapt while a consumer is in almost all cases protect against changes.

This asymmetry has a consequence for the semantic versioning. In the OSGi, the semantics are defined that a micro change does not affect the provider nor the consumer. A minor change affects the provider, and a major change affects both. Therefore, a bundle that implements a provider type must import a range from major.minor.micro … major.minor+1.0. A bundle that implements a consumer type must import major.minor.micro … major+1.0.0.

In theory, bnd could have hard coded these policies but there are always cases where the policy is just not right. The -provider-policy specifies the macro to use for calculating the version range. The default definition is:

-consumer-policy ${range;[==,+)} 
-provider-policy ${range;[==,=+)}

The range macro works very much like the version macro. It uses a template to define a change the range/version.

The provider and consumer policy are global and this is not very convenient if you want to make an exception just for a specific bundle. For example, a bundle coming from Gavin King’s Ceylon. For this reason, you can also specify a policy on an import:

Import-Package com.gavinking.*;version="${range;[--,++)}", * 	

The counterpart of the -provider-policy is of course the -consumer-policy.