What is the purpose to use Maven Tycho plugins. I read here tycho is used for building eclipse plugins and OSGI bundle.
Questions:- Can not we build eclipse plugins and OSGI bundle just by using the plain old maven POM.xml file[by not using tycho plugin].
What does maven need tycho plugin to help it build eclipse plugin and OSGI bundles?
Why should we use Maven tycho plugin to build eclipse plugins and OSGI bundles?
When using maven (or other command line build tools) manifest.mf) in combination with Eclipse (or another IDE) the classpath ends up being written down twice - once in the pom.xml and once in the Eclipse .classpath (or, for OSGi, in the target platform and manifest.mf). This violates the DRY principle.
There are various solutions to this problem. One is something like m2e, where you use the pom.xml to generate the Eclipse .classpath. Alternatively, you can go in the other direction and start by getting things compiling in Eclipse, and then use a maven plugin to convert that Eclipse setup to a maven build. This is what Tycho does, with the extra wrinkle that it works from a PDE manifest + target platform rather than directly from the .classpath.