With the Java Web Services Developer Pack (JWSDP) releases, we (Sun) solved this
problem by creating an installer that allowed shipping only one copy of each
library in the distribution, but copied them to all the webapps as they were
being installed. The downside is you have to create and maintain an installer,
which is a real pain, but it does let you have your cake and eat it too.
Yeah, this was something that really bothered me about the JWSDP (and the inclusion of the JAXB 1.0 RI as ONLY distributed as part of the JWSDP).
One common best practice for project organization (without something like Maven, of course), is to check in the full "distribution packages" of software and third-party libraries that are used as part of the application, and extract those libraries as part of the initial build process. This way you can have everything required for the application checked into your SCM system of choice, and a fully automated build & test process, and versioning of libraries/components along with the software.
This becomes much more difficult with packages using installers, because now you've incorporated a platform-specific component, and one which is much more difficult to automate and script in those types of organizations and environments, because now there's something else that you have to either have developers manually install (making it difficult to version along with the rest of the product), or you have to come up with installer-specific installation scripts. Or you have to have one person install it, and then zip up the target, and cross his fingers that the installer didn't have any undocumented side effects like setting environment/registry variables or making certain files read-only. Shipping a .ZIP file eliminates this uncertainty. This exact problem has led to some people avoiding the JWSDP entirely for exactly this reason.
So if the move is going to be to an "installed" form, I might humbly recommend that this be for a form which includes all the example files, but that a separate "binary" distribution be still made available in a .zip or .tar.* format which doesn't include the example applications, which solves the issue as well.
Kirk Wylie M7 Corporation
Off-topic but related jibe: Why in the world should I have to specify a system environment variable to run something self contained in a set of jar files, particularly at runtime? (speaking of JAXB 1.0) Sigh.
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