In any case, a MANIFEST.MF is not a Maven-specific metadata file, so even with polyglot support, m2e would need to crawl in parent to find out whether there is a parent pom which defines the folder of the current plugin project as module... Seems quite intrusive in IDE.No m2e(-tycho) doesn't support pom-less projects, because well, they're pom-less :-)m2e lacks native support for polyglot maven (more generally Maven extensions), this is something I need to discuss with Igor and JVZ at some point but, according to igor, it will be very hard to implement.