In a PDE project is there a way to add third party bundles from the file system as a dependency for my project? I am looking to do the same thing that the BND tool allows; add a bundle to the local repository and then import the packages from that bundle in the project. I do not want to use the maven osgi plugin.
I have already tried creating a user library with the external bundle and setting it to the project's build path but that did not help.
What you're after is the target platform. Any bundle in the target platform is on the build path of projects with the right package imports. The tool to create a target platform is under Window->Preferences->Plug-in Development->Target Platform.