Changes in 4.2.0

Bnd/Bndtools 4.2.0

Bndtools

• Bndtools is now built to run on Eclipse Oxygen or later.
• The Bndtools repo has been merged into the Bnd repo. So there is now a single repo and single build which builds Bnd and Bndtools.

Bnd

• Changed use of reflection in many places to use MethodHandles. This should provide some performance improvements especially in macro processing.
• Bnd CI builds now also build and test on Java 11.
• A brand new class file object model and parser was added and class file processing was improved which should realize some performance improvements. A side effect of this is that Bnd is much more thorough at locating Class.forName references in processed byte code and can then generate Import-Package clauses for those referenced packages that Bnd 4.1 did not see. So you may see additional packages in the generated Import-Package manifest header.
• The -pom instruction will now add -buildpath dependency information to the generated pom's <dependencies> section for each -buildpath entry that contains a pom.properties resource. You can use the maven-scope attribute on -buildpath entries to use a different scope than compile.
• Built-in project path properties such as project.buildpath and project.sourcepath now use File.pathSeparator to separate entries in the path. Previously : was always used as the path separator.
• Added macro support to reference environment variables by prefixing the environment variable name with env.. For example: ${env.HOME}. This is consistent with Maven's support for accessing environment variables.
• Connections settings file processing now supports using macro values to access system properties and environment variables.

Bnd Command Line

• TBD

Documentation

• TBD

Bnd Maven Plugins

• TBD

Bnd Gradle Plugins

• The Bnd Gradle Plugin jar, biz.aQute.bnd.gradle, has been changed to no longer include all Bnd dependencies. Its pom file now has a <dependencies> section which references any required Bnd dependencies which must be available to the build script.
• The Bnd Gradle Plugins have been updated to support Task Configuration Avoidance when using Gradle 5.0 or later. This should provide a reduction in build time for large builds especially when only building a subset of the complete build. To take complete advantage of this, you will likely need to make modifications to your build scripts to also avoid task configuration. See how Bnd's own build scripts were updated for this.

Backward compatibility

• Bndtools is now built to run on Eclipse Oxygen or later. So Bndtools 4.2 may not run on older versions of Eclipse.

Known Issues

• TBD