Some Eclipse Foundation services are deprecated, or will be soon. Please ensure you've read this important communication.

Bug 292774

Summary:	Better diagnostics of package uses conflicts
Product:	[Eclipse Project] Equinox	Reporter:	Tillmann Seidel <tseidel>
Component:	Framework	Assignee:	equinox.framework-inbox <equinox.framework-inbox>
Status:	CLOSED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	P3	CC:	beyhan.veliev, glyn.normington, l.kirchev, markus.tiede, nico.rogasch, thatnitind, tjwatson, udo.hafermann
Version:	unspecified	Keywords:	helpwanted
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	PC
OS:	Windows XP
Whiteboard:

Description Tillmann Seidel

2009-10-20 10:58:19 EDT

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: M20090211-1700

OSGi reports package uses conflicts with a single line: 

Package uses conflict: Import-Package: foo.bar; version="0.0.0"

The package stated is usually only the starting point for a long search down the dependency graph to find the real culprit for the conflict. If the application is complex, it is nearly impossible to do such a search manually, having only the tools of the OSGi console at hand.

The OSGi resolver which is checking the uses conflicts has all the information which is needed to find the conflicting packages very fast. This information is currently not given to the user and (to my knowledge) only availably when debugging the OSGi resolver. 

It would be very helpful to enhance the package uses conflict message in the console with this information. Or, if this turns out to be too much information to give out on a console, it would be great if there was at least some debug trace on the OSGi bundle which could be turned on to get this important information.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1 Nico R

2011-09-22 04:23:35 EDT

This Bug is open for almost 2 years now. Is anybody thinking about fixing it?
I just had a frustrating search through masses of package dependencies and finally found all package conflicts in my enterprise application, where a better diagnostic could have done it in 5 minutes.
While googling the issue I found masses of people who complained with the same problem and several guides to help find the cause, that all pointed at the pittyfull diagnostics of Equinox OSGI, so why has this bug such minor attention?

Comment 2 Glyn Normington

2011-09-22 04:41:31 EDT

Note that Virgo has quite sophisticated support for analysing uses constraint failures from Equinox. One possibility is to port that code into Equinox. Another possibility for certain users is to run the Virgo kernel in place of Equinox and get those diagnostics now.

Comment 3 Nico R

2011-09-22 05:42:56 EDT

(In reply to comment #2)
> Note that Virgo has quite sophisticated support for analysing uses constraint
> failures from Equinox. One possibility is to port that code into Equinox.
> Another possibility for certain users is to run the Virgo kernel in place of
> Equinox and get those diagnostics now.

Thanks for the tip. I know that Felix apparently also provides better diagnostics, but porting my code over to some different OSGI engine wasn't an option for me, first cause I don't want to spend the effort and second because I'm working in a enterprise application development project where software usage is more restrictive.
Which brings me to another thought: if somebody spend the effort to let Eclipse Virgo do it, why can't Eclipse Equinox?

Comment 4 Thomas Watson

2011-09-22 09:12:37 EDT

(In reply to comment #3)
> Which brings me to another thought: if somebody spend the effort to let Eclipse
> Virgo do it, why can't Eclipse Equinox?

Equinox can and should provide better diagnostics.  Virgo spent a lot of time to provide better diagnostics and I would love to be able to bring some of their concepts (or code?) into the framework to provide similar diagnostics directly from the framework.  But we need help, anyone willing to contribute here?

Comment 5 Glyn Normington

2011-09-22 09:43:18 EDT

If someone steps forward, I'm happy to provide pointers to the relevant code in Virgo.

Comment 6 Markus Tiede

2013-05-24 11:35:15 EDT

This issue also hit me today - I added a few more information on how to debug the OSGi resolve here [1]. This might be helpful until this enhancement gets implemented.

[1] bug 407730 comment 16

Comment 7 Udo Hafermann

2014-08-08 07:49:21 EDT

Wouldn't https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=421604 and https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=420067 address this issue?

Comment 8 Thomas Watson

2014-08-08 08:48:45 EDT

Thanks!  Yes, I'm marking as a duplicate of bug 420067 since that is where the trace option is implemented for Luna:

org.eclipse.osgi/resolver/uses

See bug 420067 comment 10

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 420067 ***