Plugin is very brittle across different combinations of Gradle

[jacek99]

We're having quite a lot of issues using the plugin across different environments

1.3 works with Gradle 1.6, but not Gradle 1.7 +
1.4 works only with Gradle 1.7, but not 1.8
Nothing works with Gradle 1.8

It would be great if plugin was backwards compatible across all versions of Gradle, so that we could always point to the latest one and have it work across multipel boxes with Gradle 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8

thanks so much

[merscwog]

Could you post your concerns about this also on the gradle forums http://forums.gradle.org/gradle?

This plugin is one of the main motivators of the message I posted on the forums recently, although I didn't call out the gradle-rpm-plugin directly.

http://forums.gradle.org/gradle/topics/3rd_party_plugins_getting_harder_to_maintain

There should probably be an rpm thread/issue about it being brittle, and also to find out how many consumers of the plugin there actually are. Heck, I think I'll make one and reference your post here.

Gradle 1.7, 1.8 and 1.9 (at least the latest release candidate) have seen changes to the internals of how CopySpecs work and the Gradle RPM plugin has always attempted to utilize those capabilities. Unfortunately, Gradle 1.8 drastically changed the internals, and 1.9 changes even a few more things.

There exists a gradle-rpm-plugin update/refactoring in a pull request that changes behavior and dependencies just slightly, but works for most (all?) situations with Gradle 1.8 (although more tests need to be added). Unfortunately, there is an issue that hasn't quite been worked around yet with Gradle 1.9 release candidates.

-Spencer

[AlanKrueger]

I just posted there, but I'll repeat this here anyway.

I originally developed this plugin to fill a need that I, myself, needed at a previous employer, but it's been more or less unmaintained since shortly after Gradle 1.4 was released earlier this year. I have very little spare time to devote to this now and I'm also concerned that my current employer's strong stance on company property will cause conflicts if I was to try to donate my time to supporting the plugin.

I welcome someone taking over maintenance of this plugin going forward, but I really don't have the resources even to manage pull requests at this point.