We use maven and the assembly plugin to create installation packages (zips). This installation package module has dependencies on our top level bundles, we rely on transitive dependencies to bring in all required bundles for our application.

Having a hibernate-osgi dependency that only depends on other OSGi ready transitive dependencies make this work correctly. Otherwise we have to basically exclude all of its non-osgi transitive dependencies and re-declare them manually.. in every bundle which uses hibernate.. (quite a few) which is a real pain in the butt.

hibernate-core and hibernate-entitymanager already have the correct OSGi metadata, but yes, not all their transitive dependencies are OSGi ready.. Ideally the hibernate-osgi pom should exclude all the non-osgi transitive dependencies of hibernate-core etc and include the osgi versions manually.. (so it saves me and others the trouble ). So that one could depend on hibernate-osgi in place of hibernate-core in an OSGi project without having to exclude non OSGi ready transitive dependencies.

If you don't choose to do this, then I guess I'll have to wait for someone from springsource to release their repacked version of hibernate-osgi, which they do for a lot of projects/libraries (http://ebr.springsource.com/repository/app/).

Let me know if you need anything else..