Building Mac-Package is relatively easy and painless. It does require Maven to be installed, whether you want to use the output in your Ant build scripts or your Maven scripts. Simply check out the project from cvs or extract a downloaded source archive. Change directories to the project's root. To build the jar file required by Ant, run the Maven command:
maven jar
This will create a subdirectory named target, within
which you will find your jar file, suitable for use by Ant. This
jar is named MacPackage-{version}.jar, where {version}
is the version number of MacPackage you just built. At the time
of this writing, the output is MacPackage-0.5.jar.
To build and install the Maven plugin in your home directory (that is, ~/.maven/plugins and NOT system-wide), you can follow the plugin creation directions on the Maven site. This simply consists of running the following command to install the plugin into your home folder (~/.maven/plugins):
maven plugin:deploy
This will allow you to play with the plugin, modify it, and see how it works. If you would rather install the plugin system-wide, you can run this command:
maven plugin:install