[tycho-user] p2 target definition - dependency hell

[Barrie Treloar <baerrach@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'm sure I've seen this in my googling, but no real answers.

In trying to build a target definition I'm balancing conflicting requirements:
* I want the minimum number of plugins to have fast downloading and
configuring my target platform
* I want the kitchen sink so I don't have to micro-manage all the
dependencies one by one.

A benefit of running maven-eclipse-plugin:to-maven was that it built
the dependency list for the maven poms as well.
I was then able to say depend on A, and it would pull in all the
transitive stuff for me.
I don't get any of this with Eclipse PDE.
Features allow me to pull in groups of plugins, but not their dependencies.

What do other people do?

I'm currently
* hand editing the *.target file to add plugins (since none of this is
a feature, and features are all that the target definition UI
understands)
* incrementally rebuilding the target platform (which still takes 10s
of seconds even with a nexus proxy in front)
* incrementally selecting a problem marker and copying the missing
class to use in a grep in the Eclipse 3.7 plugins directory to find
which plugin to add to the *.target file

Am I missing the easy way?