JBoss uses the SARDeployer for any file ending on "sar". It should only do so for files ending on ".sar" (including the dot).

To reproduce, get joda-time-1.0.jar from http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/, and copy the jar to the deploy directory.

JBoss will throw a DeploymentException:

11:17:03,371 ERROR [MainDeployer] Could not initialise deployment: file:/Users/alain/jboss/jboss-4.0.1sp1/server/lgs/deploy/joda.jar
org.jboss.deployment.DeploymentException: Failed to find META-INF/jboss-service.xml
at org.jboss.deployment.SARDeployer.parseDocument(SARDeployer.java:533)
at org.jboss.deployment.SARDeployer.init(SARDeployer.java:140)
at org.jboss.deployment.MainDeployer.init(MainDeployer.java:828)
...

After removing the file "org/joda/time/tz/data/Asia/Makassar" from the jar, the exception disappears.