I haven’t looked into the exact way in which the byte code patching is implemented. My guess is that it’s buried in the core framework code, but maybe not. If this is something that would make a difference to you, you might want to file a feature request against Felix or Equinox (not sure which you use).

Also, I’ve suggested a talk on this topic for EclipseCon called “Does OSGi have to be hard?”.

https://www.eclipsecon.org/submissions/2011/view_talk.php?id=2066&search=osgi+hard

If the talk is accepted I’ll be looking for experiences like yours to illustrate the problem. If you’d be willing to share more details offline, let me know.

— Patrick

Another sticky situation is system properties – I’d say that that could be handled this way as well.

I have asked myself the same question – why is this problem not tackled in other platforms?

It seems to me that other platforms simply get around the problem by making environment changes – but this is not an option when you don’t control your environment (installing into client sites etc). We’ve resorted to modifying libraries so they are better behaved.

Good info, I’ll be looking into this. Any way to isolate the byte code patching from the framework?