Thank you, Kerry, for your kind and encouraging words!
Kenn, I wondered as well whether there exist proactive options. I know
that gradle will warn of soon-to-be deprecated syntax in the build.gradle
files when executing gradle tasks on the command-line. Perhaps we can
start there. Not to sound cliche, but with any process improvement,
awareness is the first step.
On Mon, Dec 5, 2022 at 3:54 PM Kenneth Knowles <k...@apache.org> wrote:
> Nice!
>
> I believe at some point in the past we made a pass to try to convert our
> stuff to this model. I wonder if we can prevent it proactively somehow,
> like disabling the legacy way of creating tasks or something.
>
> Kenn
>
> On Mon, Dec 5, 2022 at 6:25 AM Kerry Donny-Clark via dev <
> dev@beam.apache.org> wrote:
>
>> Thanks Damon! I really appreciate how clear your emails are here. Instead
>> of my usual feeling of "I don't quite understand, and don't have time to
>> get context" I can read all the context in the mail.
>> This error message had confused me, so I really appreciate the cleanup
>> and explanation.
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 2, 2022, 7:28 PM Damon Douglas via dev <dev@beam.apache.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello Everyone,
>>>
>>> *If you are new to Beam and coming from non-Java language conventions,
>>> it is likely you are new to gradle. At the end of this email is a list of
>>> definitions and references to help understand this email.*
>>>
>>> *Short Version (For those who know gradle)*:
>>> A pull request [1] may fix the continual error message "Error: Backend
>>> initialization required, please run "terraform init"". The PR applies Task
>>> Configuration Avoidance [2] by applying changes to a few tasks from
>>> tasks(String) to tasks.register(String).
>>>
>>> *Long Version (For those who are not as familiar with gradle)*:
>>>
>>> I write this not as an expert but as someone still learning. Gradle [3]
>>> is the software we use in the Beam repository to automate many needed tasks
>>> associated with building and testing code. It is typically used in Java
>>> projects but can be extended for other purposes. We store code related to
>>> our Beam Playground [4] that also uses gradle though it is not mainly a
>>> Java project. The unit of work for Gradle is what is called a task. To
>>> run a task you open a terminal and type "./gradlew nameOfMyTask". There
>>> are two main ways to create a custom task in our build.gradle files. One
>>> is writing task("doSomething") and the other is
>>> tasks.register("doSomethingElse"). According to [2], the recommendation is
>>> to use the tasks.register("doSomething"). This avoids executing other work
>>> (configuration but don't worry about it for now) until one runs the
>>> doSomething task or another task we are running depends on it.
>>>
>>> So why were we seeing this "Error: Backend initialization required"
>>> message all the time? The reason is that tasks were configured as
>>> task("doSomething"). All I had to do was change this to
>>> tasks.register("doSomething") and it removed the message.
>>>
>>> *Definitions/References*
>>>
>>> 1. https://github.com/apache/beam/pull/24509
>>> 2.
>>> https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/task_configuration_avoidance.html
>>> 3. https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/what_is_gradle.html
>>> 4. https://play.beam.apache.org/
>>>
>>> *Suggested Learning Path To Understand This Email*
>>> 1.
>>> https://docs.gradle.org/current/samples/sample_building_java_libraries.html
>>> 2. https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/build_lifecycle.html
>>> 3. https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/tutorial_using_tasks.html
>>> 4.
>>> https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/task_configuration_avoidance.html
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> Damon
>>>
>>>
