Gradle manage plugins on generated POM using maven plugin - maven

Question

I'm on a team where maven and gradle is used, and I have a gradle project that wants to generate a functioning pom file so that our maven users can keep using maven.
I have solved this problem so far as generating a pom with appropriate dependencies as follows:
build.gradle excerpt:
task createpom(dependsOn: 'build') << {
pom {
project {
groupId project.group
artifactId project.name
version project.version
}
}.writeTo("pom.xml")
}
build.finalizedBy(createpom)
This works well for creating just the dependencies on a pom, but gradle's maven plugin API does not seem to support defining the contents of the <build> tag, which I need to import certain plugins for a successful maven build.
In short, I need one of the following:
Postprocessing the build tag into the generated POM. I could do it by manipulating the file directly, but prefer not to.
Splitting the POM into two parts, one with only gradle managed dependencies, and one with only the human managed things. Unfortunately, I don't see any means of arbitrarily naming a pom dependency by file name; only solutions that involve adding a pom only project or using multi-module builds, neither of which I like considering that I have no need for a shareable parent pom or multi-module project. I would much prefer something akin to <import>my/arbitrary/path/buildstuff.xml</import>, since all a really need to do is glue two halves of a POM for the same project/lifecycle together.
Is there a better way of accomplishing this other than what I've found so far?

Answer 1

I went with the XML tweaking solution, which proved to be far more elegant than I anticipated. Implementation involved adding an unmanaged pom to my project directory to hold the human-managed parts of the build, and modifying my createpom task as such:
task createpom(dependsOn: 'build') << {
pom {
project {
groupId project.group
artifactId project.name
version project.version
}
}.withXml {
def templateXml = (new XmlParser()).parse('pom-unmanaged.xml')
asNode().append(templateXml.build)
}.writeTo("pom.xml")
}
pom-unmanaged.xml takes the form of a typical pom, minus the bits that my gradle build script generates.