Older versions of Hibernated provided two jar packages, among others: hibernate itself and hibernate annotations. Why was hibernate-annotations merged into hibernate-core?
I used keep entities in a separated project depending only on hibernate annotations and jpa specification. That project could be shared among other projects without hibernate, for example, a prototype app without persistence requirements.
On newer versions of hibernate, the hibernate specific annotation definitions are now provided by hibernate core itself. Therefore, now, such entities projects forces all other projects to transitively depend on hibernate, even if not wanted or required.
Is there a design issue that I might be missing? I know that JPA2 specification covers most mapping needs, but there are still some hibernate annotations useful for performance tuning.