Maven Tools for Eclipse: Patching POMs

I’ve added a new feature to my Maven tools for Eclipse: Applying patches to POMs.

This is a first step towards solving issues like this one: Bug 342046 - Invalid third party dependencies in Mavenized BIRT plugins

I’m not 100% happy with the result, though. Currently, the patch overwrites the original code. I think it would be much better if it created a profile instead. This way, you could see the original code and it would be simple to switch between different solutions for a problem in a POM.

The two standard problems are:

• Bad version (no version, version range or wrong version)
• Dependency name

The latter is introduced by the fact that Eclipse projects need to pull dependencies via Project Orbit. Orbit often renames dependencies so there is a naming conflict if you pull your dependencies from Maven Central. So we need a way to say “I’m using Orbit” and “I want Maven Central”.