Hi Team,
I just want to highlight some things about the Android 34 PR[4] to make
sure it's reviewed properly.
Namely around the Gradle management changes that the PR introduces. To
summarize, Cordova-android@12 and earlier utilised an empty
wrapper.gradle file to create a wrapper task to install the wrapper of a
given version. The empty wrapper.gradle file allowed gradle to do it's
thing without importing AGP or any other modules that may require a
specific gradle version. This in turn allowed end users to have pretty
much any gradle version installed and we would be able to install the
wrapper at the version that the android project needs.
However this strategy relies on the deprecated/removed -b flag which
allowed you to specify a "build.gradle" file. This means we can't
specify the wrapper.gradle file anymore.
The PR went through several iterations but I'll skip ahead to the
current state.
As recommended by Gradle[1], the PR now includes the wrapper in the
repository, including the .jar file. Cordova-Android tooling no longer
uses the system gradle at all, and exclusively uses this wrapper.
Otherwise the end-user would have to have a system gradle version that
satisfies AGP requirements (currently that is Gradle >= 8.6). There was
some concerns about redistributing this wrapper file and/or binary files
with our releases, so I reviewed Apache Licensing policy[2].
I believe we are in the clear because the policy has instructions for
how to bundle dependencies, and what is acceptable vs not acceptable.
For context, the Gradle build tools is licensed[3] under Apache 2-0.
Under bundling Apache 2-0, the policy states:
"Assuming that the bundled dependency itself contains no bundled
sub-components under other licenses, so the ALv2 applies uniformly to
all files, there is no need to modify LICENSE. However, for completeness
it is useful to list the products and their versions, as is done for
products under other licenses.
If the dependency supplies a NOTICE file, its contents must be analyzed
and the relevant portions bubbled up into the top-level NOTICE file."
Gradle Wrapper itself doesn't provide any LICENSE or NOTICE files along,
so there isn't anything to bubble up in our NOTICE file. Therefore the
only thing that is recommended (but not required) is to list the Gradle
Wrapper and it's version within our own license file.
Additionally, Apache's instructions has Binary distribution section
which reads as follows:
"What applies to canonical source distributions also applies to all
redistributions, including binary redistributions:
All redistributions must obey the licensing requirements of the contents.
When assembling binary distributions, it is common to pull in and bundle
additional dependencies which are not bundled with the source
distribution. You must account for these additional dependencies in
LICENSE and NOTICE. As a result, the LICENSE and NOTICE files for a
binary distribution may differ from those in the source distribution it
was built from.
In any case, the principle remains the same: LICENSE and NOTICE must
exactly represent the contents of the distribution they reside in."
In otherwords, binary redistristributions are to be handled exactly the
same way as source redistributions.
I just wanted to highlight this detail in case if there are further
concerns that should be addressed before the PR is merged.
Cheers,
[1]
https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/gradle_wrapper.html#sec:adding_wrapper
[2] https://infra.apache.org/licensing-howto.html#bundle-asf-product
[3] https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/licenses.html
[4] https://github.com/apache/cordova-android/pull/1678
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