[Android-tools-devel] Gradle packaging status update

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

Markus Koschany:
> Am Samstag, dem 20.08.2022 um 18:27 +0200 schrieb Thorsten Glaser:
>> On Sat, 20 Aug 2022, Phil Morrell wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all, documenting my observations as of today because it's not looking
>>> promising for bookworm.
>>>
>>> * kotlin FTBFS because of changes to support openjdk 17 #1012214
>>
>> If gradle depends on kotlin, it’s not eligible for stable anyway
>> because kotlin currently depends on two unsupported JDKs that are
>> available in unstable for bootstrapping and (old…‑)stable support
>> but nothing else.
> 
> I agree, help with Kotlin would be really appreciated. At some point it started
> to FTBFS and this should be the first point of investigation. After that we
> should try to package a newer version that builds with and supports Java 17.
> 
> I'm making only slow progress with Gradle 6.x because of the long feedback loop
> (changing something, rebuilding and testing takes forever) but the goal is
> still to replace Grade 4.
> 
> My conclusion so far is that Debian would be better off if we started to use
> different build systems whenever possible. Most of the time it would be a
> realistic task because many projects upload their artifacts to maven.org and we
> could port those Gradle projects to Maven based projects. I have started to
> work on a few projects and sometimes you could really just use javahelper to
> build an artifact and in the end building from source is the only thing we
> need.
> 
> Gradle might be a fantastic tool for visual and GUI driven developers and large
> projects which also use it as a project management tool. In Debian we just need
> something to build source code from the command line and Gradle is simply
> overkill in this regard.

I totally agree that we should build without Gradle whenever possible.  I'm also 
happy to hear you are still working on it, because there are many things that 
would not be feasible to build without Gradle.