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
