I'm not sure that what you mean here, but in other instances entries from within WEB-INF/lib can contain deployment metadata info: e.g. a CDI bean deployment archive (library jar) may contain META-INF/beans.xml or a JPA PU deployment may contain META-INF/persistence.xml.
Sure, those are all valid alternative locations -- as per the spec.
But not all are. ;-)
e.g. see the JBDEPLOY-232 use case --> jboss-classloading.xml in some lib jar, treated as deployments metadata :-(
I suppose that the same could apply for META-INF/jboss-spring.xml (as it happens now in the case of JBoss AS 5.0 and JBoss AS 5.1).
Sure, all I'm saying you need to re-think if this is still valid,
and if yes, then mark the deployers as the one that accepts alternative locations.
Otherwise it will not pick up metadata in lib's -- in after-jbdeploy-232 Deployers versions.