Re: gradle reboot

Emmanuel Bourg:
> Hi Julien,
> 
> Le 04/11/2024 à 14:43, Julien Plissonneau Duquène a écrit :
> 
>> This is to let you know that I am currently working on overhauling and 
>> upgrading the gradle package to the upcoming 8.11 release. This is indeed 
>> quite challenging and I am not yet to the point where I could share a repo and 
>> let others experiment and contribute, but I hope to get there in a few days or 
>> maybe next week, I will then post an update with a link.
> 
> Thank you for tackling this issue, this challenge requires a lot of time, skills 
> and patience. It's long, thankless, but definitely fun if you are a bit 
> masochistic.
> 
> 
>> My current plan is to make it at least a 2-stage build as there is no point in 
>> trying to make its complicated buildscript work with the currently packaged 
>> version 4.4.1. I don't know yet if the versions of Groovy and Kotlin currently 
>> in Debian will work with these builds but I will try.
> 
> No they won't work. Getting Kotlin 1.3.31 to build with Java 17 was an epic 
> achievement but unfortunately it didn't even allow us to package an incremental 
> update of Gradle.
> 
> Kotlin and Gradle are tightly coupled, and unless you are ready to rewrite their 
> build systems with something else and replace the Kotlin code in Gradle, I don't 
> think it's possible to bootstrap them separately.
> 
> That was the motivation behind the gradle-bootstrap package currently in sid: 
> start with a binary only package containing Gradle, Koltin and their 
> dependencies, and use it to gradually rebuild these components from source until 
> the bootstrap package is no longer needed. I haven't pushed further in this 
> direction by lack of time but I still think that's the best strategy to build a 
> recent version of Gradle and Kotlin.
> 
> Note that there is also an issue with the Gradle enterprise plugin that isn't 
> open sourced and has to be removed. I don't know if Gradle 8 is still affected.

It is great that you are taking this on!  It is a very valuable thing to get 
done.  I will try to help and review as I find time, but I'm really slammed at 
the moment.

Another thing I can offer is help with funding for doing this work, if that is 
interesting to you.  Specifically, NLnet's Mobifree fund 
(https://nlnet.nl/mobifree/) is likely to fund this kind of work because Gradle 
is so important for Android.  And having Gradle in Debian means it truly is free 
software.  I will happily help you put together a proposal for NLnet.  The money 
would then go directly to you.  They pay you as a gift from a foundation, and 
the overall process is relatively easy.

.hc