[tycho-user] Need info about mirroring maven artifacts in a p2 mirror wi

["David M. Karr" <davidmichaelkarr@xxxxxxxxx>]

A while ago, I asked questions in here (and other channels) about my 
Eclipse plugin build, using Tycho, which was "hard-storing" some maven 
artifacts in the project instead of specifying them "declaratively".  I 
tried for quite a while to figure out how to specify them as Maven 
dependencies, but I never got it to work.

I started to understand that the only way to get this to work was to be 
able to access those artifacts in a p2 repository, so I can specify 
those dependencies in my target platform.  The administrator of the 
Nexus server that I use has been working on this, but he's telling me 
that the artifacts mirrored in this repository have to be OSGi bundles.  
A "plain" Maven artifact jar won't work.

I'm now understanding that it's straightforward to "augment" an existing 
Maven artifact with the appropriate META-INF/MANIFEST.MF file to have it 
be recognized and properly used as an OSGi bundle.  This can be done at 
build time with the "maven-bundle-plugin", but Nexus also has the 
ability (I don't know the details yet) to semi-automatically add 
manifest info to artifacts so they can be used in a p2 repo.

However, I'm also hearing that even if the artifact is a valid OSGi 
bundle, it won't properly work in a p2 repo unless it can somehow see 
"features".  What do I have to do to plain Maven artifact jars to make 
them usable in an Eclipse plugin build as repository targets in a target 
platform specification?