Jason Greene wrote:
As you know, I never really bought into the reasons behind packaged deps. I think OSGi is the only modularity spec that advocates them, and even they are moving away from them with their capabilities and requirements notion.
No - OSGi is not moving away from the package dependency model, that is an incorrect observation. The generic capabilities and requirements provide an additional level of declaring dependencies in cases where you don't have this information available as packages. Examples are the existence of an IoC (beans that are being injected typically don't have a package dependency on the IoC container) or some other type of extender.
OSGi is the most mature modularity system around today and although it supports other types of dependency declaration the package dependency model has been found the best dependency model by all OSGi experts that I know of.