I am converting Subclipse to build with Eclipse Tycho and Maven.
Subclipse depends on a few third party JAR files that are not Eclipse plugins so do not exist in any p2 repository. Currently, I just include these in a lib folder within the plugin.
Since these JAR files do exist in Maven, I was hoping that by converting the plugins to build with Maven I could use Maven dependencies. IOW, the plugin would have a pom.xml where I used Maven dependencies to grab and include the third party jar's that have to be included in the plugin. Basically, it would just automate having to refresh what I include in the lib folder of the plugin.
Is this possible? I tried doing what I said above by when I build, I saw no sign that Maven/Tycho was trying to fetch the dependencies. I imagine it is because when the packaging is eclipse-plugin it looks solely at the Eclipse configuration files for the dependency information.
Thanks
To add plain (without OSGi metadata) jar files into your folder at biuild time, you can specify an <execution> of the maven-dependency-plugin to fetch them. However it will require to update your MANIFEST.MF Bundle-Classpath directive whenever a version changes.
It's usually better to hunt for OSGi-able jars or to make an extra effort to package existing libs as OSGi bundles/p2 artifacts like Eclipse Orbit or JBoss Tools Locus do.