FELIX-6736 Emit properties in alphabetical order

[kwin]

No description provided.

[kwin]

@cziegeler Please have a look, this test fails without sorting the keys first.

[kwin]

I would like to increase the minor version here in order to ease depending on this fixed version.

[laeubi]

As you only changed internal behavior, package versions are not for "easing" anything but to allow semantic versioning so increasing the minor is wrong here.

Suggested change

	@Version("1.1.0")
	@Version("1.0.1")

[kwin]

This is a potentially backward incompatible semantical change (affecting consumers). Just a change which is not detected by baselining because the method signature did not change. Therefore adjusting the minor version is IMHO the right thing to do!

[laeubi]

If it affects consumers you need a major version bump.

[cziegeler]

It is expected that the tests fail, the configuration object preserves insertion order - if you read and write the same feature without changes, it should be identical (maybe minus whitespaces, indention).

[kwin]

I just aligned with the logic from

felix-dev/configadmin/src/main/java/org/apache/felix/cm/file/ConfigurationHandler.java

Line 210 in 958c28d

for ( Enumeration ce = orderedKeys(properties); ce.hasMoreElements(); )

. But I am also fine with making this an opt-in behaviour.

[cziegeler]

ConfigurationHandler is not really a public API. The configuration writer is used for the various feature model implementations and it would be pretty annoying if it would destroy out of the sudden the order of things. So yes, opt-in makes sense to me.
A different option is to have a utility method that has a Dictionary as an input and outputs a sorted Dictionary. This could then be used everywhere, not just when writing out configurations.