Does a Tool released to Maven support :tools/usage? If yes, how so? Do I need to include my deps.edn in the built jar?

No, :tools/usage only works with git (and local) source-based deps. Basically deps.edn-only stuff.

Artifacts released to Maven/Clojars have a pom.xml files as the "system of record" inside the JAR and that contains a list of other Maven/Clojars dependencies (that are all "standard" :mvn/version style libraries).

@kenny ☝️:skin-tone-2:

Got it. Thank you. It might be nice to add that :tools/usage is not supported for maven to the website docs in https://clojure.org/reference/deps_and_cli#_tool_usage.

https://github.com/clojure/clojure-site/issues/584

I have thought about this quite a bit and I wouldn't close the door on ever supporting artifact based tools, but it raised more issues than I was willing to solve before the initial tool release

One workaround would be to make git dep wrapper with a tools/usage around a maven artifact