At first I think the IDE case is really a compelling user story. But
then I realized that for Hibernate at least we actually have to
customize so many parts of the IDE tasks that a random unconfigured run
would be essentially worthless. Perhaps that is not the common project
case, dunno.
Couple that with the fact that truthfully I would much rather see
better Gradle support in the IDEs themselves.
On Thu 16 Aug 2012 09:37:23 AM CDT, Ken Sipe wrote:
On Aug 16, 2012, at 9:08 AM, Hans Dockter wrote:
On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 12:39 PM, Luke Daley
<luke.da...@gradleware.com <mailto:luke.da...@gradleware.com>> wrote:
On 16/08/2012, at 1:30 AM, Adam Murdoch wrote:
Hi,
Something we've wanted to do for a long time is have some way to
automatically apply a plugin when you run Gradle from the
command-line and/or IDE. There are a number of nice usages for this:
* Running 'gradle idea' automatically applies the idea plugin
and runs the 'idea' task. This is useful, for example, when
working with an open source project whose developers don't use
IDEA. Same for the eclipse plugin.
* Running 'gradle wrapper' automatically applies the wrapper
plugin and runs the 'wrapper' task, which sets up the wrapper to
point at the current version (the wrapper plugin doesn't exist
yet). Or running 'gradle wrapperLatestRelease' automatically
applies the wrapper plugin and runs the 'wrapperLatestRelease'
task, which sets up the wrapper to point at whatever the version
athttp://services.gradle.org/versions/currenthappens to be. This
is useful for managing which version your build needs, without
needing to have these tasks defined in your build.
* For the new bootstrap and upgrade/migration plugins, you'd be
able to run 'gradle bootstrap' or 'gradle checkUpgrade' or
whatever, without having these defined in your build. In
particular, it would mean you could go to a directory containing
a Maven build and no Gradle stuff, run 'gradle bootstrap' and
you've got an initial Gradle build.
* It would allow us to move some stuff out of core and into
plugins. For example, the daemon management command-line options
like --stop could instead be a task in a plugin. And this would
give as a good place to add more daemon stuff (e.g. query the
daemon status). Or the help tasks and reporting tasks could live
in a plugin. Or the profiler could live in a plugin, which would
allow us to offer more report formats and so on.
Off topic: Why is this option “--stop”? What is it stopping
exactly? The world?
The basic idea is that when an unrecognised task name is
specified for a build, Gradle will look for a plugin that
provides that task, and apply the plugin. Initially, we're only
interested in providing this for built-in plugins, but
definitely want to extend this to custom plugins at some point.
I'm not convinced about the auto apply of plugins. I can see the
convenience of it, I'm just not sure it's worth the cost.
However, if it facilitates moving more “core” functionality into
plugins then that's enough for me… though there might be other
ways to do this.
There is also the templating/archetype use case. As you pointed out,
modularization is very important in this context.
+1
I think also that it is extremely uncool that you have to modify the
build script of a project where you are not a committer to let it
generate metadata for let's say idea.
+1
I think there is a convenience we can provide with that which is
pretty important in a variety of scenarios. Additionally it is also
something people would expect, specially when coming from Maven.
Hans
For me, this is also pretty far down the list of priorities. I'd
be more impressed with good tools for verifying Gradle upgrades
than the fact that I can do it with adding anything to my
buildscript.
There are a few basic approaches to how a plugin declares which
tasks it provides:
1. We maintain a hardcoded list in core.
2. We add a resource that we can find using
ClassLoader.getResources(), called, say
META-INF/gradle-plugins/meta-info.properties.
3. We add something to the existing
META-INF/gradle-plugins/${plugin}.properties.
4. We add some annotations to the plugin implementation.
Options 1 and 2 are easy to implement. Options 3 and 4 require
us to scan the classpath and cache the result. But, we need to
do this kind of thing anyway (invalidate task outputs on
implementation change, plugin-provided services, declarative
extensions and the like).
Options 2, 3 and 4 mean auto-apply would be available for custom
plugins, provided you're using a custom distribution or an init
script.
Option 4 means we can include this information in the DSL reference.
We might combine options, so that you use annotations in your
source and at build time we generate an easy-to-find resource.
Implementation-wise, there are a bunch of issues to sort out:
* How does a user discover the full set of tasks that are
available? Include them in the output of 'gradle tasks'? A new
report? The DSL guide? All of the above? Something else?
There has to be a way for a user sitting in front of a build to
determine *all* of the things they can do with it. I don't like
the idea of magic tasks that there is no way I can know exist at all.
* What do we need to expose through the tooling API?
* How do we deal with plugins that should be applied once per
build (wrapper, bootstrap, profile, etc) vs those that need to
be applied to all projects (idea, eclipse, etc)?
* How will this interact with camel case matching? Do we
consider first the set of declared tasks, and then second the
set of implicit tasks, or do we consider them all in one set?
* How will this work for build types? (and, what is a build type? :)
* How do we make this work for custom plugins?
This last question is interesting. We might use the plugin
portal here, to serve up meta-data about plugins. We'd hit some
web service, give it (gradle version, task name) and get back a
list of candidates. The result would be cached, of course, and
we're respect the --offline flag. Doesn't help with custom
plugins for the enterprise, of course.
I'll think some more on it, but I'm not big on this idea. As I
said, I'm just not sure the convenience is worth the cost.
--
Luke Daley
Principal Engineer, Gradleware
http://gradleware.com <http://gradleware.com/>
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