With additions being made to the module descriptor, it's becoming obvious that we could generate module descriptors. Most of the current information is redundant with the pom (or deducible), and most new information (components, ...) can be derived from analyzing the sources. (annotations, interfaces)

Such a Maven plugin should ideally "merge" with a possibly existing module descriptor, so that one could still manually set some information in a module descriptor (properties, perhaps). OTOH, the plugin configuration will probably allow setting such values, so maybe that's not needed at all.

Deriving module name: use artifactId, if prefixed by magnolia-module-, remove prefix.
Finding components: we could use APT (Annotation Processor Tool: http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/guide/apt/GettingStarted.html - there's actually a Maven plugin: http://mojo.codehaus.org/apt-maven-plugin/) to find @Component. Marking some of our interfaces with it might even reduce the need for the annotation (i.e we could mark ObservedManager with such an annotation)

http://wiki.magnolia-cms.com/display/DEV/Module+Descriptor+Generator+%28maven+plugin%29