And again, to be clear, Steve: This was already the way it worked in Hibernate. Hibernate already respected <exclude-unlisted-classes> in SE environments. All I did was report a bug in that it was improperly parsing <exclude-unlisted-classes>, and then I provided a patch for that bug. If Hibernate wants to stop respecting <exclude-unlisted-classes> in SE environments, that would be a feature change. It would not be a bug, because the the spec allows it. I would strongly disagree with that change (actually, I would abandon Hibernate completely and switch to EclipseLink if that decision was mode). However, as it was at the time I reported this bug, Hibernate did have this feature and the feature was malfunctioning.