(CI) Building Eclipse PDE plugins from Maven

...is a pain in the arse.

After evaluating maven-pde-plugin, which one would think would make it easy, turns out not so much.

I've swapped over to using Tycho (because it appears to better support multiple build options, like update sites and RCP apps directly instead of just plugins and features), but that isn't proving trivial even in the most basic sense still.

But, using Tycho 0.9.0 from the ibiblio org.sonatype.tycho groupid (not to be confused with org.codehaus.tycho...or several other groupId's I've run into) you still have issues:

Errors like: "Cannot find lifecycle mapping for packing: 'eclipse-plugin' come up a lot. Looking at the off-chance there is a dependency issue, you are required to use an unstable release version of Maven 3 (as of 7/26/2010 at any rate). Using maven 3.0-beta-1 you now get "Unknown packaging: eclipse-plugin"...so not much help there either.

Searching for help on either of these issues get posts like 'fixed in Tycho 0.5.0', or 'you need to modify how you build from source'...which if you get the binary from a public maven repository one would hope would work as expected (per why most people want to use maven so you DONT run into these issues).

Other people mention 'update m2eclipse'...except I'm running this from the command line for the purpose of eventually moving to Hudson/Continuous Integration. Maybe I mis-understand the purpose of this maven plugin and it must be used in eclipse with m2e?

Please help if you read this!

EDIT: reason for chasing down why I want to automate Eclipse PDE builds is

1) I have an RCP app I would like to migrate over (from Eclipse 3.0 unfortunately)

2) primary reason was to pre-load company JDBC drivers for use in Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php?t=msg&goto=549384)

ANSWER: do not assume the 'convention':


WRONG plugin artifactId: maven-tycho-plugin

CORRECT plugin artifactId: tycho-maven-plugin