After thinking about this some more I think the major issue is that one cannot tell from the top level plan whether a dependency is a plain jar or if it includes a 570-node tree of recursive sub-dependencies. Renaming and autogenerating the xml config file, while good ideas, won't help with this problem.
The 570 nodes are still there - it comes down to do you want the user to have to figure all that out by hand and explicitly put them in the plan, or do you want the deployer to figure it out as it is building the configuration.
I don't want to do it by hand so would opt to have the deployer do it. Having a tool that told me what I needed put in the repo would be useful though.
-- Jeremy
