Derive serviceloader capabilities and requirements from hand-crafted services files

[HannesWell]

BND can derive the OSGi requirements and capabilities necessary for the OSGi service loader mediator specification leveraging BND's @Provider annotation. These annotations have retention policy CLASS and only require a compile-time dependency to biz.aQute.bnd:biz.aQute.bnd.annotation.
Nevertheless from my experience projects that are not familiar with OSGi but are asked to add OSGi metadata (e.g. by using the bnd-maven-plugin) are often reluctant to add these, for them, 'random/foreign/unknown' annotations to their code base.

At the same projects that provide services often already manually maintain their service descriptor files.
BND can also generate this file, but at the same time this file provides the most important information about service providers.
Therefore it would be quite convenient if bnd would consider an existing service descriptor file as an (optional alternative) source to gather service providers.
At the moment the necessary requirements and capabilities are maintained explicitly as bnd-instructions as a work-around in such cases.

[pkriens]

No problem with this functionality, will you provide a PR?

[pkriens]

It might be an idea to bring the ServiceProvider/ServiceConsumer in the realm of OSGi. This tends to ease the anxiety.

[HannesWell]

No problem with this functionality, will you provide a PR?

Great. I can give it a try, but I have to admit it is not the No.1 on my priority list.
Nevertheless can you give me some pointers where the start best?

It might be an idea to bring the ServiceProvider/ServiceConsumer in the realm of OSGi. This tends to ease the anxiety.

Yes that will probably already help.

[pkriens]

I am taking a look at it, so wait a bit.