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The current manifest editor is confusing and doesn't help much in the creation of a valid manifest. In particullar, the presence of automatically generated attributes suggests that the editor is smarter than it is, that it is not just a plain text editor. It would be nice to have an editor that does not require a precise knowledge of Manifest grammar. The editor should prevent creating syntactically invalid manifest , not just disable the OK button. One possible approach would be to present a structured table (similar to the properties editor) with separated main section and per-entry sections, an extensive list of available attributes (including all attributes listed in the documentation) with some sort of automatic value generation where possible (e.g. the Main-Class can be generated by searching for static main method in the sources).
See this thread for a relevant discussion http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.netbeans.cat36/406
At least basic syntax validation and r/o display of attrs and sections should not be hard. apisupport already does something like this. (It does r/w manifests, actually, but does not preserve formatting on writes.)
Should not have any open issues in jarpackager component.
*** Issue 52874 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Update: apisupport/project now contains EditableManifest which (I hope) complies with the spec but (unlike java.util.jar.Manifest) preserves formatting upon structural edits.
Reassigning to "java".