Since I have heard no objection, I've continued working on moving the project from ant+ivy+maven to gradle.
At this point I've contributed significant time to this project. I hope everyone has taken the time to consider this change and their possible concerns. I don't want to beat a dead horse, but there is too much effort involved to get caught up at the end. There is still a lot to do, it's not going to happen tomorrow, but many, many things are done. The performance of the build in comparison to what we had will astonish you on good hardware. Even comparing to your experience with the majority of maven builds, this will be *significantly* faster. This is without using the gradle build cache or paying proper attention to task uptodate properties. There are considerable improvements and benefits we can reap from this change, but the sheer speed has made the development experience for me way more enjoyable. My goal is to take us from a very powerful but complicated and slow and clunky and dense build to what is essentially a modern top tier build experience in power, performance, integrity and ease of use. I've made significant progress over the past month or so, but it will likely take me another 2-4 before I plan on having something I'd considered ready for prime time 9x duties. I'll take the time needed to get things right, hopefully everyone else will take the time to help with a transition when that time comes. My hope is that version 9 is the first built with gradle. We can consider it being available on 8 as well, but I don't think it makes sense to release 8x versions with gradle. I think we should only consider the gradle build on 8x as a developer convenience and it would be on the users of it to address keeping it up to date with changes on the ant build as problems arise. Depending on the time, it may not even make sense to put effort here. This weekend I'm wrapping up some work on making our dependency management headache more transparent. I think we can make a lot of improvements on understanding what is in our build and why and what is published or shipped where and why. -- - Mark http://about.me/markrmiller
