[pde-build-dev] Update on Mavenizing Eclipse Builds

["Wendell Beckwith" <wbeckwith@xxxxxxxxx>]

I have made good progress on using maven to build eclipse plugins and features.  Part of the success comes from using the Apache Geronimo maven-geronimodevtools-plugin that they built to build the geronimo WTP server connector.  Their solution works on only part of the case but I believe it can be extended to work for more general cases.  Mainly it creates a target platform in the maven 2 repo to which plugins can be resolved against.  Eclipse plugin dependencies are dynamincally added to the maven 2 classpath to allow the normal maven-compiler-plugin to compile the code.  next it is a simply matter to use the jar plugin to wrap everything up in a neat little jar for deployment.

Now this isn't the perfect solution I'm shooting for since the compile stap does not enforce the access rules that the eclipse compiler would use.  There is a way to configure the normal mavan-compiler-plugin to use the eclipse compiler but I need to see what interface it exposes that would allow me to pass the access rules to it.  If there isn't away then we will need to look at either replacing the maven-compiler-plugin in the default maven lifecycle or create a cloned lifecycle that includes the eclipse compiler in place of the maven compiler plugin.

Things that i wouuld like to see improved:

1.) Better plugins for mapping metadata from the Manifest.mf and build.properties.
Speciafically in the area of how dependecies are handled.  The geronimodevtools plugin maps all eclipse dependecies to maven dependencies where all eclipse plugins in the target platform are mapped to maven like

<dependency>