Official ANTLR gradle plugin support

[Rene Groeschke]

Hello ANTLR Team,

my name is René and I'm a core committer to Gradle. Gradle currently
ships with a Antlr plugin that supports ANTLR2, 3 & 4. In the long term
we have plans to move plugins out of the gradle distribution.

I'd like to ask if the ANTLR team is willing to take ownership of the
official Gradle Antlr plugin? That would basically mean to deprecate the
antlr plugin support shipped with Gradle and move the current
implementation (and most likely also enhance) to the antlr github
organization handing over the ownership to you.

Are you interested in that? I thought it is a good idea as the quality
of the ANTLR plugin would benefit from your deeper antlr knowledge and
you're already maintaining the Antlr maven plugin(s). The gradle team is

happy to help with the initial setup; get the intial version up and running and the
linking to the gradle plugin portal. I'm looking forward hearing back
from you.

Best regards,
Rene

[Eric Vergnaud]

Hi René,

I can only speak for myself, and we'll have to see what Terence says.

it's great to hear that such a plugin exists

since antlr is merely a cmd line tool with a bunch of parameters, it is genuinely not obvious whether this plugin requires more antlr expertise or more gradle one...

I suspect the latter :-)

we're obviously very happy to help anyone with gradle expertise with documentation and support

Eric

[Steve Ebersole]

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/antlr-discussion/Y5fVOqa7QXc

Hopefully Terence follows up with that one...

Eric, while I understand the perspective that "antlr is merely a cmd line tool with a bunch of parameters"... that is:

1. not really accurate - Antlr does also publish Maven plugin
   
2. part of the problem as way too much processing is done inside the Tool class itself so as to make it nearly impossible to write custom code initiating Antlr parsing without *intimate* knowledge of the Tool class.

In regards to (2), I have tried multiple times to write a generalized Antlr 4 plugin for Gradle but it requires copy/pasting much of what Tool does.  It also defines odd options (-lib) that actually get in the way of non-Tool builders.