I'm moving my project to Maven and eventually OSGi. I currently distribute the project is a large Zip file with all the dependencies. Although my projects code is only 20% of the total package I have to redistribute all the dependency. With smaller independent modules this may be even less.

Looking here on stack overflow it seems that to keep my current plan the maven-assembly-plugin should do the trick.

I was considering having a base installer that would look at a XML manifest, then collect all the libraries that needed to be updated. This would mean that libraries that change occasionally would be downloaded less often. This also makes since for something like OSGi plugins (which could have independent release schedules). In essence I want my software to look and manage individual libraries, and download on demand (based on the manifest).

I was wondering if there is a "maven way" of generating this Manifest and publishing all the libraries to a website? I believe the deploy life-cycle would do the second step.

As an alternative, is there a OpenSource Java library that does this type of deployment? I don't want to embed Maven or something larger with the distributed code. The application is not for coders, the simpler the better, and the smaller the installer the better.