Brett Meyer, I've created the manifest metadata configuration. Maybe you could have a look at https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-search/pull/574!?

using my quickstart [1]

Brett Meyer, not sure whether I am just blind, but what are you referring to? I keep looking for a link to something!?

For instance, we had to create "SessionFactoryService" and "PersistenceProviderService"

I guess a SearchFactoryService would make sense, but I need to understand this whole thing first a bit better. I guess I can also check what you've done in hibernate-osgi.

Regarding testing, have you heard of Pax Exam, which offers apparently Junit based integration testing for Karaf (see http://davidvaleri.wordpress.com/2013/09/17/integration-testing-osgi-bundles-in-apache-karafservicemix-with-pax-exam-3/). To me that sounds and looks quite promising, but of course it is so far only theory to me.