I have a maven project in Eclipse with a bunch of local project dependencies.
Building with the Maven assembly plugin or shade plugin is a pain because I first have to build and install all of the local project dependencies before I can build my main project.
Does m2e provide a way to script a sequence of arbitrary maven commands? I know I can script everything from the command line, I just don't know where m2e's instance of maven is installed, and I'd like to avoid installing a separate instance.
Have you considered creating a multi-module Maven project that "contains" the dependencies? That would allow you to build just the container and Maven automatically takes care of building the component modules. Eclipse's m2e supports multi-module builds so there wouldn't be anything special to do for Eclipse.