You have a Maven 2 project, and would like to work on it in Eclipse. Oh, and you want the Maven plug in for Eclipse configured on this project too!
The solution:
The first thing I do when I check out a Maven project is generate the Eclipse project files. Start by going to the project's root folder and typing:
mvn eclipse:eclipse
This will create the files Eclipse uses to understand the project, .project and .classpath. There are links to the jars configured via the pom in the .classpath file. You will want to get rid of these, because the Maven plug in will handle dependency configuration. Go into the .classpath file and delete all "classpathentry" nodes that have "M2_REPO" in the path attribute value. Now save this file.
At this point your project should have errors. Eclipse cannot find the jars needed to build properly. Worry not. Now we will enable the Maven plug in. Right click on the project root node in the package explorer to bring up the menu. Select "Maven" and then "enable". After a bit of processing your project should rebuild. Now you have the benefits of the Maven plug in!
