Few weeks ago, we (QA dept) discussed your second option - to distribute the deps in a form of maven repository.
Taking our mavenization trend into account, that would be beneficial because Maven-based testsuites could work with the *ARs from the distribution without needing to do mvn install:install-file for each artifact needed in the process.

The problem could be the limited length of classpath on some systems.

Ondra

Bill Burke píše v Čt 01. 04. 2010 v 17:19 -0400:

instead of the way our JBoss AS distribution is structure now, why not 
introduce the idea of maven-based booting and deployment?

Core components (specifically deployers, sars, really anything in the 
JBoss domain) of a profile (default, minimal, all, etc.) would only 
include bean.xml and other configuration files.  Within beans.xml or a 
different file, each deployment unit would specify its dependencies, 
either through <dependency> elements, or a list of maven artifacts, i.e.

org.jboss.resteasy:resteasy-jaxrs:2.0

That way our distribution can be either very very tiny, just a zip of 
text files that point to our maven repository.  Or, very optimized, we 
ship a maven repository with the distribution that shared between the 
different profiles.

This could get very interesting over time.  Deployment units could 
delegate to the base AS for versioning, much like maven modules delegate 
to a parent pom for dependency versions.  We could automatically create 
scoped deployments or issue warnings if base AS and the deployment unit 
require different library versions, etc.

Just a thought...

Bill