Igor Fedorenko has been working on Tycho and Maven to create a system to facilitate OSGi and Eclipse development in Maven, and m2eclipse is currently built using Tycho. Sonatype is busily working to address these gaps, and we already have some solutions you can use to start building your Eclipse plugins in Maven. There seems to be no really automated build system for Eclipse plugins/products, even when using maven you have to install and update the dependencies manually (the Eclipse artifacts are not deployed to a maven repository). With increasing use of product configuration options, the number of build quirks increases as well.

Building Eclipse plugins and products has quite many quirks. I have looked into building Neoclipse using Maven, but at the moment I'm not convinced there are more advantages then disadvantages in this case. On Tuesday (or maybe it was Monday), Anders asked the neo4j-users list whether it made sense to build the neo4j eclipse plugin with Maven. Yesterday's post was in response to a question from Anders Nawroth of the Neo4J effort, and today's post is no different.

Eclipse how to install pde