Parallel to this, the geronimo maven deploy plugin now can unpack this "distribution" into a directory of your choice. As before, the plugin can start geronimo, deploy applications, start configurations, stop configurations, undeploy configurations, and stop geronimo.
I've posted some details on the wiki: http://wiki.apache.org/geronimo/Running
The openejb itests are now using this. Since I got some tests working I enabled them as part of the openejb build to encourage others to figure out what remains broken.
many thanks, david jencks
