Maven conversion using init plugin & dependencyManagement

Old Forum Archive Bugs
1

When converting a large multi-module maven project to gradle all of the information in the parent pom’s dependencyManagement section, which exists to avoid replication of dependent version data, is replicated in all of the leaf build.gradle files.
This leaves the developer with the task of re-consolidating version replication over hundreds of files. I don’t know anyone that would consider this a viable option.
Ideally the init plugin would leverage https://github.com/spring-gradle-plugins/dependency-management-plugin to define the project’s global dependencies in a single location.

IMO the init plugin is not useful for any large scale migration until it understands and preserves the singleton dependencies defined in maven’s dependencyManagement and creates a similar single instance list in the resultant gradle output.
Until then it’s an interesting experiment with limited applicability to the real world.
If this worked, it would drop the barrier to entry for gradle considerably.

2

I agree that there is a need to declare the versions in a single place, I disagree that it should be done via a 3rd party plugin (https://github.com/spring-gradle-plugins/dependency-management-plugin)

I think it could be as simple as a section in the root project

ext.springVersion = '4.2.0.RELEASE'
ext.hibernateVersion = '3.6.7.Final'

And references in the child projects

dependencies {
    compile "org.hibernate:hibernate-core:$hibernateVersion"
    compile "org.springframework:spring-jdbc:$springVersion"
}
3

Lance’s suggestion to define version strings in the root project works for me.
I suggested the spring plugin as it allows more control over transitive dependencies than simply defining version strings in a common location.
ie:

dependencyManagement {
    dependencies {
        dependency('org.springframework:spring-core:4.0.3.RELEASE') {
            exclude 'commons-logging:commons-logging'
        }
    }
}

I’m not picky, just, don’t make me have to refactor 40K of generated build.gradle files to extract all the version info that exists in maven dependencyManagement section.