Ant closures no longer working in 7.6?

Help/Discuss
1

Hi,

I used to use the ant closure syntax to execute ant tasks in my gradle file, i.e.

ant
{
  copy (...)
  ...
}

This seems to no longer work with Gradle 7.6. I get a non-informative error message:

> Problem: failed to create task or type call
  Cause: The name is undefined.
  Action: Check the spelling.
  Action: Check that any custom tasks/types have been declared.
  Action: Check that any <presetdef>/<macrodef> declarations have taken place.

“ant.copy” syntax still works. Is this an intended change (i.e. deprecated and phased-out way), a bug or an error on my side?

Thanks in advance,
Klaus

2

I strongly wonder why you use the copy Ant task actually as there is a much better Gradle alternative, but I’m just assuming that was not the real-life example but just an arbitrary example.

This was a (hopefully) unintended side effect of Add ability to use closure-like methods on props by octylFractal · Pull Request #21242 · gradle/gradle · GitHub which causes the ant builder to try to find the task call now incorrectly and fails in finding it. You should open an issue about this regression in 7.6.

3

Hi Björn,

indeed the copy was only an example. We moved our projects from Ant to Gradle and still have some third-party Ant-Tasks in our build process, e.g. the “wsimport” from JAXWS. Btw, the copy task of Ant is still handy, I have to admit, while I used the Gradle version also in the past.
I am going to open an issue, I’ll refer to the pull request you mentioned. Thanks for your help.

Klaus

Edit: the issue is #23111

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