[pde-build-dev] Eclipse bundles on the Maven repository

["Tom Huybrechts" <tom.huybrechts@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I've been using Maven to build Eclipse plugins for some time now. This
is currently a bit of a pain, since I synchronize between the pom.xml
and manifest.mf manually. Other than that, it isn't that hard. Some of
the things I did are:
- deploy required Eclipse bundles to our corporate Maven repository,
including simple POMs that define their internal dependencies.
- translate the manifest dependencies to pom dependencies for my own
projects. I used a small script to create the initial set of poms for
my projects, but updated them manually afterward.
- create a packaging mojo (a Maven plugin) that uses the
build.properties to assemble the artifact.

This works well, with some limitations. If a plugin you're using has
jars included, you can't let Maven put it on the classpath. I got
around this by creating my own compiler plugin, that wraps the normal
compiler but first unzip the jars and then creates a custom classpath.

Also,since I'm using the normal Java compiler, Import-Package headers
are not verified.

Anyway, to get to the topic of this post: it would make it easier to
allow people to build their own plugins using Maven, if the eclipse
bundles were available on the Maven repository
(www.ibiblio.org/maven2). There already are some plugins available
there, but not enough.

The hard part would be to create correct POMs for each of the bundles:
- translate Require-Bundles and Import-Package to dependencies
- decide how to map Bundle-SymbolicName into a groupId + artifactId.
- versions can probably be copied verbatim when you're not using snapshots

The usual way to get something uploaded to ibiblio, is to put an
upload request on the Maven JIRA together with the JAR and POMs. See
http://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-ibiblio-upload.html

Tom