That netbeans configuration is gross, I've never seen such a thing. From what I can tell poking around, -do-jar-with-manifest is used only when there is an existing manifest file rather than an ant-define dynamic manifest. My personal advice would be not to accept future contributions that depend on an IDE-generated ant/maven file in order to build; that is a maintenance disaster. If I didn't need those OSGi headers so badly, I never would have continued trying to figure out that crazy netbeans file. It uses XML namespaces in the tags for Christ sake. Anyway, I think the "do-jar-without-manifest" is actually the correct semantic for what it is.