Build timestamp in JAR and UP-TO-DATE

[Moe]

Continuing the discussion from Dynamic MANIFEST.MF attribute (new Date()) causes Gradle to build the jar every time, even though nothing else changed:

@wujek_srujek

Hi. I have a jar task, where I add some MANIFEST attributes:

jar {

manifest {

attributes(

‘Implementation-Title’: project.name,

‘Implementation-Version’: project.version,

‘Build-Time-ISO-8601’: new Date().format(“yyyy-MM-dd’T’HH:mm:ssZ”)

)

}

}

The problem is with the timestamp - it causes the jar task to be executed every time. When I comment this attribute out, the jar task can be skipped. That’s a problem as this is an api module, and all others depend on it, and as the jar changes, all other modules are recompiled even though they don’t really need to. What can I do to also have the jar task skipped? I imagine gradle stores a snapshot of the attributes, and compares them with the new ones, and sees they are different (new Date()), and hence re-jars.

wujek

Continuing the discussion from Dynamic MANIFEST.MF attribute (new Date()) causes Gradle to build the jar every time, even though nothing else changed:

@luke_daley

It’s not possible to do what you need right now. I was pointing out that we are working towards supporting this kind of thing.

I’m facing the same problem right now. Is this somehow possible in the latest version of Gradle?

[luke_daley]

It’s still the case that there’s no support for surgically ignoring changes like this.

What people tend to do is make things more static during development. For example, in non release builds using a static date. Or, something less dynamic such as the last mod timestamp of the most recently changed file.

[kec2 (Klaus Christiansen)]

Any news on this? Because I still see the problem.

[jjustinic (James Justinic)]

There is still no support for just ignoring the value if you set it at configuration time.

This isn’t really a problem though because you’ll often see the manifest attributes wrapped in doFirst { }. This delays setting them until execution time and they only impact the task after the task is otherwise outdated and running anyway.