Prevent gradle from deleting cmake targets

Help/Discuss
1

In the cmake task of my externalNativeBuild, two targets are generated:

  1. a shared library
  2. an executable linked to the shared library

According to strace on the gradle build daemon, gradle is deleting the shared library after the external build completes. If I remove the executable (2) and only build the shared library (1), then gradle does not delete it. So somehow gradle is thinking that the shared library (1) is probably a temporary or intermediate file and does not need to be part of the build. In fact, it is a target, and must not be deleted. Listing both targets in the cmake task does not make any difference, gradle still deletes the listed target after generating it.

2

Usually, this means that you somewhere might have misconfigured your build, or maybe you are hitting a bug. But this is pretty impossible to tell unless you provide an MCVE.

3

Thanks for your reply, though I’m totally new to gradle and I’m working on a very large project that is entirely proprietary–both factors making it quite difficult to produce an example that I can share. Is there a way to simply prevent gradle from ever deleting anything produced by cmake? It’s 100% certain from strace that gradle is deliberately deleting the shared library after it is generated by ninja. All I need is for this idea of “delete some build outputs” to be disabled. I’ll keep all the build outputs, no matter what they are, or how large.

4

My mistake, it is cmake that is deleting the target! For some reason gradle is going behind my back and using an old cmake 3.18, which has this bug, even though I explicitly specified the full path to cmake 3.27. Anyway, problem resolved.

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