I'm faced with a certain deployment issue, for which I've created a small maven project (see attachment) so anyone can easily reproduce this behaviour.

I have a scenario where I have two EAR deployments: base.ear and service.ear. The latter uses some services of the former. For this to work, it has all the necessary entries in its manifest.
Once deployed, I can call the EJB from service.ear and the EJB from base.ear gets injected and used. No problems so far.

This works fine, until I want to update base.ear.

We have our own mechanism to update deployments (through the management API), but the same result can be achieved by deploying through the JBoss Admin console or JBoss CLI.
So, when I update base.ear (just replace with the same base.ear file) it deploys fine and the invocation is successful. However, there's one line in the console which goes like:
JBAS014777: Services which failed to start: service jboss.deployment.subunit."service.ear"."service-ejb.jar".FIRST_MODULE_USE: org.jboss.msc.service.StartException in service jboss.deployment.subunit."service.ear"."service-ejb.jar".FIRST_MODULE_USE: JBAS018733: Failed to process phase FIRST_MODULE_USE of subdepl
oyment "service-ejb.jar" of deployment "service.ear"

At this moment, the service.ear, and all its EJBs, isn't really deployed anymore. Or atleast, wrongfully deployed. Not sure how to call that state.
One possibility is to invoke the :reload command (or restart the server), but ideally we'd like to not have this error in the first place.