It should be possible to build Ergo using Maven and Tycho to make the build cleaner and remove copies of 3rd party libraries from our git repository. Having copies of the library instead of references to them makes it difficult to upgrade libraries used by Ergo.

The drawback is that there would be some initial upfront work because we cannot directly reference the maven libraries in the typical way from the pom file since Ergo needs them to be eclipse plugins. We would need to create a maven-tycho project to publish 3rd party libraries to a p2 repository so they can be pulled into Ergo. After that, we would need to mavenize Ergo plugins/features and reference the p2 repository. Once the projects were setup to build and publish the p2 repository of 3rd party libraries, it should be straightforward to upgrade libraries in the future. The tasks would be:

1) Use maven + tycho to publish a p2 repository with all 3rd party libraries to a web server
2) Mavenize our bundles and features.

References:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13268213/maven-tycho-build-with-third-party-bundles

http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/EclipseTycho/article.html