Hi all,

I'm a newbie to both tattletale and OSGI. I'm in the process of scanning a set of osgi bundles to find duplicate jars,unused jars, duplicated classes in the bundle class-path. My objective is to remove unused jars inorder to make the bundle as lean as possible.

I'm using tattle 1.1.2 tool since it turned out to be the most easy-to-use tool to get an overview of the classpath of the scanned project.

What I do is basically extract the bulky bundle and generate the tattletale report from bundle-root.

In doing so, I found many cases of unused jars being embedded as dependencies in the pom.xml of the projects as per the generated tattletale report. I removed them and started the bundles without any compile-time or osgi-start-time exceptions. I'm yet to findout if they throw any runtime exceptions.

However I'm not fully convinced on how tattletale provides a report on unused jars in an osgi bundle. Can someone please explain how tattletale scans a bundle class-path by answeing the below questions I got?

• Does tattletale only check for jars in the classpath to generate the report?
• Does it check  plain classes in the bundle classpath (eg: classes in exported packages are inlined and added to bundle classpath)?
• When identifying dependencies does tattletale also consider about dynamic classloading cases (eg: class loading via java reflection)
• Does it check the imported classes in a particular class-loading hierarchy? 

In general please provide a guide to understand how tattletale scan a project to provide a report on class dependencies,unused jars.

Thanks,

Dileepa