I'm totally fine with this "limitation".this will only work if you generate the .target file in one reactor and then consume it in a separate reactor. Generating and using the the .target file in the same reactor will not work, so this is not officially supported as of now.
Not sure how it is related, but I've made some experiences on the surefire-mojo to get it resolve dependencies by itself when dependencies are not available (such as in a pom packaging type). This allows to invoke Mojo from a non-Tycho packaging: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=388909 https://github.com/mickaelistria/tycho/commit/dda678326c60c98c2d2cd311d6f331beeb02afa4A prerequisite for this to work correctly would be that bug https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=353889 is resolved.