In an ideal world, this plugin shouldn't need to exist. However there are times when errors are present in the manifest of 3rd party JARs, especially if you work with OSGi based environments.

Typically developers rely on 'bnd' to generate the required OSGi Bundle information in the manifest. Whilst 'bnd' works 99.99% of the time (and is a great tool), if there is heavy use of reflection or direct class loading it can fail to generate the correct export and import package entries. Occasionally it may also generate incorrect version information as well. And occasionally, developers may incorrectly configure 'bnd' as well...

This plugin to designed to assist in this instance.

In general, yes. However, patches can take time... bug reports can be ignored or even worse closed with WONTFIX.

The plugin has been designed to simply skip signed JARs. It was a design decision to not modify signed JARs (and thus stripping the signing information).

A quick survey of artifacts located in my personal local maven repository showed only a few signed JARs, so don't expect this to be much of a problem.

The plugin only works on the outer-most JAR and does not modify any internal JARs.