This seems to be a regression since 5.5.x. The jars in the binary distribution of 6.0.18 contain a MANIFEST, but the contents are minimal, for example jsp-api.jar contains: Manifest-Version: 1.0 Ant-Version: Apache Ant 1.7.0 Created-By: 1.5.0_12-b04 (Sun Microsystems Inc.) whereas the jsp-api.jar in 5.5.27 contains: Manifest-Version: 1.0 Ant-Version: Apache Ant 1.7.0 Created-By: 1.4.2_12-b03 (Sun Microsystems Inc.) Name: javax/servlet/jsp/ Specification-Title: Java API for JavaServer Pages Specification-Version: 2.0 Specification-Vendor: Sun Microsystems, Inc. Implementation-Title: javax.servlet.jsp Implementation-Version: 2.0.public_draft Implementation-Vendor: Apache Software Foundation I think all the generated jars should contain the following properties: Built-By: Name: Specification-Title: Specification-Version: Specification-Vendor: Implementation-Title: Implementation-Version: Implementation-Vendor: X-Compile-Source-JDK: X-Compile-Target-JDK: Also, all the jars should contain NOTICE and LICENSE files.
The spec jars should be easy to fix. I don't see how many of those values apply to most of the Tomcat jars. What, for example, would you expect the manifest for catalina.jar to look like? I can see the point of the NOTICE and LICENSE files as it makes adding the Tomcat jars to Maven etc easier but they are not required for the standard Tomcat distributions.
I have committed a proposed fix to trunk for the spec jars and proposed it for 6.0.x. I am expecting some debate on how best to do this. Once we have agreed how to handle the spec JARs, we can look at extending this tot he remaining JARs.
The regression with the spec jars has been fixed and will be in 6.0.19 onwards. The remaining jars are outstanding.
No idea when it happened but checking the 6.0.45 proposed release shows this has been fixed.