Detect if dependency comes from a version catalog

Help/Discuss
1

I’d like to write a plugin to enforce a rule within our project that any dependency that is available in our Gradle version catalog must be declared using the version catalog.

For example, it should throw an error on this:

dependencies {
    implementation 'com.google.guava:guava:32.1.2-jre'
}

And then we want to allow:

dependencies {
    implementation libs.guava.core
}

The main difficulty that I’m hitting is that when I look at the ModuleDependency objects in DependencySet, I do not see any way to detect if the dependency comes from the version catalog or not. I get normal name and group values.

How can I tell if a dependency is declared using the version catalog or the standard notation?

2

I don’t think you can.
At least I’m not aware of a way, not at runtime.
Only using some static code analysis maybe.