Gradle 4.8 RC2 is available for testing; see the release notes.
After updating from 4.7, the following message is printed 25 times on every Gradle invocation:
As part of making the publishing plugins stable, we are removing the 'deferred configurable' behavior of the 'publishing {}' block.
We don't want to silently break your build, so we need your help for the migration.
Please add 'enableFeaturePreview('STABLE_PUBLISHING')' to your settings file and do a test run by publishing to a local repository.
If all artifacts are published as expected, there is nothing else to do.
If the published artifacts change unexpectedly, please see the migration guide for more details: https://docs.gradle.org/4.8-rc-2/userguide/publishing_maven.html#publishing_maven:deferred_configuration
In Gradle 5.0 the flag will be removed and the new behavior will become the default.
Thanks for letting us know! This was already meant to be fixed but did not make it to the release branch. We will fix it for 4.8 RC3: https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/5564