As in my comment on HSEARCH-2823 Open : I'm open to explore alternatives and simplify things but it's important (to address what Guillaume also refers to): it needs to be usable for people with no permanent connection. Think like non-technical people who need to put it on a pen drive to help out their friend living on the mountain.

Maybe we should just simplify things and move to a flat directory (avoiding complex sub-directories) ?

BTW I suspect the main problem of our current approach is that the tarballs aren't tested. We use careful eyeball based inspection, and this tends to be errorprone. Maybe investing into an integration test using good old flat classpath / ANT could help us to take away the "stress" of not being sure about the dist tarball to be correct?