Since finding a way to do the same thing with Gradle efficiently seems to be far too difficult I’ve decided to write my own tool in Go for resolving Maven dependencies:
Here’s how it works:
$ echo commons-io:commons-io:2.4 | ./go-maven-resolver
https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2/commons-io/commons-io/2.4/commons-io-2.4.pom
https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2/org/apache/commons/commons-parent/25/commons-parent-25.pom
https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2/org/apache/apache/9/apache-9.pom
It resolves ~500 dependencies in our project into 744 POM URLs in ~5 seconds. Now we can update the Nix store with new Gradle dependencies in around a minute.