Maven Tools 4 Eclipse

Maven Tools 4 Eclipse (or m4e for short) is a set of tools to convert OSGi bundles into Maven artifacts.

It's written in Python. I just mention this because I happen to like Python. After installing 2.7 and [1], you can forget about it.

In fact, if you just want to use the Maven artifacts in your build, go to our server at http://maven.eclipse.org/nexus/index.html

How it works

A simple workflow:

Download an Eclipse release from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
Import it into a temporary using m4e-import.py
Download the sources for the Eclipse release and/or other archives which contain Eclipse products or OSGi bundles.
Import them as well
Merge all repositories using m4e-merge.py
The sources are in the wrong place. Fix that with m4e-attach-sources.py
Fix any know problems by applying the patches in the patches/ folder using the tool m4e-apply-patches.py
Check the result with m4e-analyze.py
Create a POM with the version info to make sure your build picks the correct versions using the m4e-dm.py tool

Overwhelmed? Here is a more simple version:

git clone https://github.com/digulla/org.eclipse.dash.m4e.tools.git
Download everything you will want and put it into the folder org.eclipse.dash.m4e.tools/downloads/
run org.eclipse.dash.m4e.tools/run.sh Yes, you need Linux or MacOS for that.
Grab some coffee. Not more than 12 cups per day, okay?
Check the HTML file which was created for any issues that you might care about.
Upload the content of org.eclipse.dash.m4e.tools/tmp/m2repo/ somewhere where Maven can find it (~/.m2/repository/ or your Maven proxy).

The name m4e sucks. [2]
Rewrite the tool in Java. This would make the installation more simple but cause two new problems: Maintenance would be more expensive and the readability of the code would suffer.
Find the time to create a repo with Eclipse 3.7