It could be very nice to let plugin authors run their builds on http://builds.gradle.org/ and host the binaries at http://repo.gradle.org. What do you think? If Gradle team put some procedures in place, similarly to Sonatype’s about Maven Central, then it would work automatically and solve the major pain for plugin authors.
We do intend to provide infrastructure for sharing of plugins as per this roadmap item. It’s not something we are actively putting a lot of work into before the release of 1.0.
As for your particular suggestions, I don’t think that that would be workable. Hosting the builds of plugins on builds.gradle.org would overwhelm the server and slow the Gradle development process down considerably (that server is already very busy). It’s also unlikely we’ll use repo.gradle.org as we want something more sophisticated than a plain artifact repository. We made the decision that we would rather wait and do this comprehensively than put something temporary in place.
Given this, and that we already have a roadmap item for this I’m going to close this thread off. If you wish to discuss this further, please don’t hesitate to do so on the roadmap thread. When the time comes that we start building this stuff out, we’ll likely spin out a new thread specifically to discuss the infrastructure issues.
I (and I’m sure the rest of the team) feel for plugin developers with the current state of affairs, but it’s definitely going to get better.
Sorry, missed that thread. Thanks, Luke, will follow it.