Gradle-rpm-plugin so brittle Gradle upgrades become a difficult decision

Old Forum Archive
1

I’m not sure about the total number of consumers of the gradle-rpm-plugin, but the below was posted by at least one user within the last 24 hours to the gradle-rpm-plugin github site.

We’re having quite a lot of issues using the plugin across different environments >

1.3 works with Gradle 1.6, but not Gradle 1.7 + > 1.4 works only with Gradle 1.7, but not 1.8 > Nothing works with Gradle 1.8 >

It would be great if plugin was backwards compatible across all versions of Gradle, so that we could always point to the latest one and > have it work across multipel boxes with Gradle 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8

Because of this exact same issue, Gradle 1.7 is the latest version in use by us in some instances, as robust rpm generation has been deemed more important at present than other core features. There is a non-released version of the gradle-rpm-plugin being tested that works with Gradle 1.8, but key functionality appears to be broken again in the latest 1.9 release candidates.

It would be good to have some idea of how many people are relying on the gradle-rpm-plugin or would consider utilizing it, if it weren’t so brittle recently.

-Spencer

2

I originally developed this plugin to fill a need that I, myself, needed at a previous employer, but it’s been more or less unmaintained since shortly after Gradle 1.4 was released earlier this year. I have very little spare time to devote to this now and I’m also concerned that my current employer’s strong stance on company property will cause conflicts if I was to try to donate my time to supporting the plugin.

I welcome someone taking over maintenance of this plugin going forward, but I really don’t have the resources even to manage pull requests at this point.

3

FWIW: we are working towards making public APIs for the internal APIs that the RPM plugin had to build on. If someone wants to take over from Alan on keep working on this that will put more pressure on us to do so.

4

I forked the plugin and did a release as com.netflix.gradle#gradle-ospackage-plugin;1.8.4 to bintray. The code can be found at https://github.com/nebula-plugins/gradle-ospackage-plugin.

5

What are your plans for maintaining this? We have been working on making some changes as issues arise for us. We also have some unreleased changes that have been accepted by the redline library project, but we’re not sure what the plans are for making a new release.

6

We actively use it, and there’s been a steady stream of commits. I just released a version for 1.9 today. I’d have no problem updating the version of redline, once redline is released.

7

Justin, Has there been any progress on moving away from the use of gradles internal api? I noticed that the plugin breaks when using gradle 2.0.

8

Nothing was added into 2.0 that would let us accomplish what we’re doing using just public APIs.

File an issue on github. I’d be really surprised if the 1.12 based version was broken in 2.0.