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It would be useful to allow reading Maven project instances from sources other than XML files, so we could create them from Manifest.mf/plugin.xml files for Eclipse plugins. Alternately, it would be useful to allow modification of the sorted project list in the reactor (possibly by way of a build-context data element) to allow a plugin to perform a second pass at project-building, and inject those built from Manifests, etc.

It would be nice if Maven could detect whether any action was taken in a previous lifecycle phase, and avoid later actions if they don't need to be performed. Big example here is the jar plugin skipping repackaging if the compile/resources phases didn't execute.