Github user ajs6f commented on the pull request: https://github.com/apache/jena/pull/134#issuecomment-206433254 No, it's not the _presence_ of MAINFEST.MF (which I think tends to appear in pretty much any JAR or WAR). It's what's in it. There are specific headers in an OSGi version of MANIFEST.MF that support the sophisticated module-dependency management that OSGi does. For example, there are headers that explain what packages are exported from the module in question, and which are imported. If you don't need them (because you aren't using OSGi), no problem. You just ignore them, and most of us do, most of the time. But OSGi needs those headers to use the JAR as a module. As to whether all of our dependencies have it, I don't know, but it honestly wouldn't surprise me. It's so easy to include these days (autogenerated) that many, many projects do it by default. On the other hand, since `jena-osgi` is packaging up some dependencies internally, than it doesn't matter whether those guys do, because OSGi is not managing those guys. And those dependencies that `jena-osgi` is not packaging up i nternally certainly _do_ have the metadata (e.g. `httpcore-osgi`). So one thing we could do here would be to have `jena-osgi` shade in the Dexx library the way it currently shades in, e.g. `xercesImpl`. But that's kind of hacky. I think the right thing to do here is work upstream and help Dexx get that little bit of metadata packed in, and then the job is done cleanly and forever.
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