Currently m2e allows to specify a lifecycleMappingMetadata to control how the mojo should be handeled in an incremental build: https://www.eclipse.org/m2e/documentation/m2e-making-maven-plugins-compat.html

A more convenient way would be to have an @IncrementalBuild annotation that has boolean properties runOnConfiguration, runOnBuild and runOnClean, specifying none of them, or all false, is then equivialent to ignore.

This can then be used to generate the xml automatic or even evaluated at runtime.

FYI @HannesWell