I'm attempting to get cordova-android to build with Gradle, and I have generally been successful, but now that it's time to commit this into the repository, I think I've run into a conflict with Apache policies.
In order to be as simple to use as possible, Gradle is usually run from a wrapper script, "gradlew", which they recommend that you check into source control with your project. Running this wrapper takes care of downloading the correct version of gradle, as well as any of its dependencies, such as plugins, for building the code. This solves a lot of the problems involved with setting up a working build system. But Gradle is a Java project, and so the script invokes Java, and makes use of a bundled .jar file, and therein lies the problem: We're not supposed to be including compiled JAR files in our repository. In this case, the .jar isn't actually part of our code; it's just used by the build, and including it makes it closer to trivial for developers to start building Cordova projects. It's easy to recreate, too, once you have Gradle installed, it's as easy as running "gradle wrapper" to get it to rebuild the wrapper, jar and all. The catch is that you already have to have gradle installed for that to work. Egg, meet chicken. Is there any way (and I'm reaching out the ASF folks here, as well) that we can include this in the project, to make our developers' lives better? Gradle itself is Apache-licensed, but including its source code instead won't actually help anyone. Perhaps if we include full instructions for recreating the wrapper, or for downloading, installing and configuring gradle as well, for those that want to do it the hard way? Thanks, Ian
