How can a maven build process be retrofitted to an eclipse developed plugin?

The eclipse plugin development environment is a pretty handy tool when creating from scratch a set of OSGi bundles that need to work together开发者_C百科. Particularly this is true when trying to get all the package imports and exports and other manifest fluff right during development, or if there are third party jars that need to be embedded. But trying to retrofit a maven build process around this afterwards seems to be pretty tricky, mainly because most of the maven plugins for bundling/OSGi build the manifest themselves, whereas using the PDE, you are handcrafting the manifest.

What is the best way to retrofit a maven build process to a bunde/set of bundles, that dont respect the standard maven project layout, and already have handcrafted manifests?

Use Tycho. It lacks some documentation, but it does just that: builds the plugins using the PDE semantics (actually, it uses PDE compiler internally). So, all you need is to create almost empty pom.xml's for your modules.