A magic role of the "non-project-through" directories in Gradle dependencies

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1

I have been browsing docs for an explanation, but have not found any clarification of such a case…
See a project structure:

├── subProA
│ ├── src
│ └── build.gradle
├── “non-project-through-folder”
- - – - - - - - ├── subProB
- - – - - - - - │ ├── src
- - – - - - - - │ └── build.gradle
- - – - - - - - ├── subProC
– - – - - - - -├ ├── src src
- - – - - - - - │ └── build.gradle
- - – - - - - -└── NO build.gradle SCRIPT ON THIS LEVEL
│
├── subProD
│ ├── src
│ └── build.gradle
├── subProE
│ ├── src
│ └── build.gradle
└── settings.gradle

root settings.gradle includes all the subprojects A,B,C,D,E - as clasic 5 include entries.

Some day a guy put a dependency to E that looked like:
implementation(project(‘:root:non-project-through-folder’))

Nobody noticed that as builds were working ok.

Reviewing the code I asked to remove the dependency (even if it was somehow effective, it was not explicit ) so I asked to replace it with explicit subproject (B or C) dependency(ies).

The dependency had been removed.

Then someone added a new subproject (let’s say F) to the “non-project-through-folder”.
The F subproject was also added to settings includes.
In addition buildSrc plugin was added for all subprojects from the “non-project-through-folder”.

BUT the new plugin have beening not providing the dependency to F … looks like the old and REMOVED dependency to:
implementation(project(‘:root:non-project-through-folder’))
is cached somewhere in Gradle and completely covers the plugin dependencies.

It took a lot of time to me to find out that only restoring the removed dependency helps, what sounds a bit magic.

Maybe I am wrong and missing something?

2

If you do include(":non-project-through-folder:subProB") that effectively adds the two projects :non-project-through-folder and :non-project-through-folder:subProB if :non-project-through-folder did not exist yet and this is also documented.

A project does not need to have an explicit build script for being a valid Gradle project. It just lives with the default settings, or things injected from outside through (bad practice) cross-project configuration like project(":non-project-through-folder") { ... } or subprojects { ... } or allprojects { ... }.

To not have that intermediate project you could for example instead do something like

include(":subProB")
project(":subProB").projectDir = file("non-project-through-folder/subProB")

That depending on project(":non-project-through-folder") changes anything if there is no actual configuration for that project indeed sounds very strange, but hard to say from here what is going on without seeing the actual build.

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