I was going off these two statements in 12.4:

"If a definition error exists in a deployment, initialization will be aborted by the container."
"If a deployment problem exists in a deployment, initialization will be aborted by the container."

The way I have the test working is as follows. Deployment of the artifact is attempted. If it fails with an exception, the AbstractTest tries to determine if this was an expected exception (as declared by @ExpectedDeploymentException on the @Artifact). I override that method in AbstractJSR299TestCase to see if the exception thrown can be claimed by the Managers implementation (such that the exception falls into a category, either definition error or deployment error).

AbstractTest#isThrowablePresent() -> AbstractJSR299Test#isThrowablePresent() -> Managers#isDefinitionError() or Managers#isDeploymentError()

If the exception thrown during deployment maps to the expected exception (via this lookup) then the test case is considered passed.

So I get what you are saying, but it appears what I implemented follows exactly that. I'm assuming that the only way to abort initialization is by throwning an exception. Maybe that is where my assumption is flawed. Feel free to revise if you feel it necessary.

-Dan