Sorry, that post wasn't as helpful as it could have been - I didn't read  
Frank's post that Andrew was responding to, and as such didn't notice that  
he was using annotations.

It's more correct to say that package-info.java was introduced to provide  
a way for annotations to be applied to packages.  A side benefit was that  
it provided a more logical place for javadoc comments for packages than  
package.html.  So far I've not needed to use it for annotations, just for  
Javadoc, so when I had problems I added an exclude pattern to the compile  
task in my Ant build files.  However, giving it some thought I couldn't  
remember exactly what led me down this path and it didn't make much sense  
that the compile should fail.  So I've just removed the exclusion from one  
of my projects and there is no complaint from the compiler (1.5.0_06 on a  
Mac).  So, either it is only a problem with certain earlier versions (this  
was a while ago with 1.5.0_something on Windows) or I had some other  
reason, that I don't recall, for wanting to exclude it.

However, if the package *is* annotated, as in the OP's example, the  
package-info.java *should* be compiled and the compiler should output a  
synthetic package-info.class (if it didn't output anything the package  
level annotations would be lost). So, returning to Frank's problem... I  
have no idea why it doesn't work :)

Dan.