I am developing some plugins for equinox from Eclipse version 3.7.2. Unfortunatelly I cannot upgrade to the latest equinox platform. The provided equinox platform does not provides "Require-Capability: osgi.ee; filter="(&(osgi.ee=JavaSE)(version=1.8))" entry in its manifest. So I cannot use "Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment: JavaSE-1.8" in my plugins. According to the answer Java 8 & Missing required capability Require-Capability: osgi.ee; filter="(&(osgi.ee=JavaSE)(version=1.8))" I am using approach " to remove the header from my bundle Manifest" and bundle successfully compiles and works with java 8 features so far.
My question is - is it safe to workaround missing capability like this? I am running my old equinox platform on java 8 so java 8 features should be available. Is it possible to use java 8 features in my plugins even if I do not specify Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment as java 8, but whole development and production run is on Java 8 ? Or does Osgi platform limit osgi.ee platform for some good reason and I have to stick with Java 1.6 ?