None of the classes are deleted when running cleanClasses.
Interestingly, clearJar and other cleanXYZ tasks do seem to wipe out all of the outputs for their respective tasks. cleanCompileJava does wipe out all of the classes, but it used to be nice to just type cleanClasses.
Using 1.0-milestone-9
-Spencer
This is somewhat of a known problem.
The ‘classes’ tasks is what we term a “lifecycle” task. This means it doesn’t actually do anything other than serve as a meeting point for tasks (other examples are ‘check’ and ‘build’).
The idea at this stage is to formalise this concept a bit more, which may include having lifecycle tasks inherit the outputs from their “children”. It can get a bit messy though, and there are some edge case behaviours to sort out.
Regardless, I’ve linked this to GRADLE-2172 to track this particular symptom of the problem as it’s the most commonly raised.