Felix on Mika

Current (April 2011) Felix distributions fail to run on Mika because of extraneous references to classes or methods which are not part of the OSGi Foundation Execution Environment (and hence not part of Mika). The offending modules are the GoGo shell (easily solved by using the "classic" shell instead) and the OBR (not so easy if you need the functionality). Since these are not core modules it is presumably "OK" that they cannot run on Foundation EE, but still a nuisance to embedded users who want the smallest runtime possible.

A JIRA issue has been raised in Felix, but who knows when it will be fixed (if ever).

I'm not sure what we should do about this (other than just documenting it). We could try to fix the relevant bundles and provide patched versions to run with Mika, but of course we would need to track the upstream versions and intercept any further non-FEE dependencies they create. Or we can add to Mika whatever classes/methods are required to get Felix to run, but once again we have to re-test regularly to see whether anything new is required. It's a pity that the developers of these projects don't think it important to be able to run in a Foundation Environment.