How to uninstall sub feature when uninstall the parent one in karaf?

Issue

Our application comes in two parts: one is the MemberServicesIvrFacade war, and one is the ServiceRoutes jar. The jar represents Apache Camel routes that are common to more than one war and can be called internally through “vm:” and “direct-vm:” Camel components.

We install these parts via separate features:install commands:

 features:addurl mvn:com.fitness.route/service-routes/1.0.0-SNAPSHOT/xml/features
 features:install -v service-routes-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT

 features:addurl mvn:com.fitness.ivr/ivr-facade-services/1.0.0-SNAPSHOT/xml/features
 features:install -v ivr-facade-services-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT

This method installs the primary features and sub-features (each feature includes a “libs” sub-feature which contains various dependencies (camel, spring, domain-model, etc).

However, even though you can install this way, you cannot uninstall this way.

We found that you had to uninstall the sub-features explicitly in order to properly update everything:

 features:uninstall service-route-libs-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT
 features:uninstall service-routes-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT
 features:uninstall ivr-facade-libs-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT
 features:uninstall ivr-facade-services-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT

In this particular case we just have one parent feature and one sub-feature, but in future cases we could have many sub-features.

Is this expected? Or is there a different way to uninstall an entire feature without having to uninstall all of the sub-features as well?