@purple-oil-45048, @average-vr-56795 has it about right, but hopefully this makes sense of it: https://www.pantsbuild.org/jvm_projects.html#jvm_bundles The gist is some pants users have historically wanted a ~tarball of their jvm app, which included both a binary portion (whether made of 1 jar or many, some jars perhaps containing resource files) and a loose-file portion, generally configuration files, but sometimes data files too. The reasons for wanting loose files instead of embedded resources generally boiled down to wanting to modify the loose files while the server embodied by the binary (jar) portion was running and then either sending a SIGHUP to the server for re-config or else restarting the server.