That is the way it used to be, and it turned out to be quite painful to maintain the list in and external xml file.
I assume you're thinking of the nested geronimo-service.xml files. This is not like that.
We're currently building the MCP from a combination of the deployment plan, the project.xml file (with magic properties), project.properties and custom jelly in maven.xml. Or we're requiring the user to supply the value as a command line parameter to the standalone deployer. Neither is particularly friendly.
This xml is really just syntactic sugar for creating a jar manifest
No, its an extension to the dependency mechanism we use for non-executable configurations to support initializing the root classloader by using the Class-Path entry from the manifest.
By declaring the dependency in the XML in the normal way the Configuration can be loaded using normal dependency resolution as well (e.g. by a deployer). We can't do that right now as dependencies don't work in executable configurations (as there is no Repository started that can be used to resolve them).
and I think we should just have our maven tool take an ant sytle manifest directly. Near the bottom of this page http://ant.apache.org/manual/CoreTasks/jar.html is an example of an inline manifest for a jar file. If we provided this feature, you would have the full power of the java manifest specification (such as service declarations), and would not be limited by the capabilities of our tool. Also since it would be inline in maven, you don't need an external tool such as velocity to preprocess the file to manage the version numbers.
I think being able to specify the entire manifest is a different feature. It might be useful to add, in which case it should be done in the same way Maven's jar plugin does it.
In fact, let's do that - have the packager build the target configuration exploded under ${maven.build.dir} and then have the jar plugin zip it up? That way we get to reuse all the features of the jar plugin.
Even if we do that, we will still need the expanded syntax in the configuration file itself so that it can be used with the standalone deployer (i.e. without maven).
-- Jeremy
