Recap on the discussions on the JIRA issue.

WebArchive war = ShrinkWrap.create(WebArchive.class, "test.war")

   .addAsManifestResource("test-persistence.xml", "persistence.xml");

System.out.println(war.toString(true));

... will give the following output:

test.war

/META-INF/

/META-INF/persistence.xml

The question is how to handle web archive WEB-INF/ and WEB-INF/classes. E.g. Service provider registrations appear in /META-INF/services/ rather than in /WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/services/. There are many frameworks that requires that WEB-INF/classes/META-INF exists, e.g. persistence spec, JSF and service providers. Therefore it should be possible to add content to the /WEB-INF/classes/META-INF and /WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/services.

My proposal after looking into this is:

war.addAsManifestResource() -> /META-INF/ (keep as is)

war.addAsWebManifestResource() -> /WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/

war.addAsServiceProvider() -> /WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/services/ (instead of /META-INF/services)

war.setManifest() -> /META-INF/MANIFEST.MF

It would also make sense to provide a method that puts a MANIFEST.MF in WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/ just as the setManifest method:

war.setWebManifest() --> /WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/