For the stability of an OSGi application, it is essential that a bundle restricts the range of acceptable versions of its dependencies; otherwise, the bundle could be wired to an incompatible version of an imported package, with disastrous results. On the other hand, an application cannot afford to be too restrictive: a complex application might re-use a package in many different places. If a strict version restriction is placed on such a package every time it occurs, it might prove impossible to deploy the application, due to conflicting version requirements. Also, a certain amount of version flexibility is required in order to deploy patched bundles as hot fixes. This chapter describes the OSGi version policies that help you to achieve these goals and explains how to implement version polices using the Maven bundle plug-in.
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