Gradle version in bookworm

[Mark Fletcher]

Apologies if this is a dumb and/or frequently-answered question,
but... does anyone know why the version of the "gradle" build tool in
bookworm is version 4?

The version in bookworm, 4.4.1-18, was migrated to testing in January
of this year -- an upgrade from version 4.4.1-13 -- at which time the
latest upstream version was at least version 7. So it doesn't appear
to be a "package not maintained any more" issue... The maintainers
appear to be the Debian Java maintenance team, who I would assume
would be unlikely to wander off... Bug reports against the package are
beginning to show evidence that people are finding the age of the
package a problem as unit tests and even some build dependencies
become harder and harder to support.

Gradle is not some minority, hardly-used tool, so there is presumably
a reason why the package hasn't been updated in Debian. Anyone know
what it is?

Thanks!

Mark

[Roberto C. Sánchez]

Becuase it's Very Hard Work(TM).

Updating Gradle in Debian was proposed as a project under Freexian's
Project Funding initiative and it was accepted and work was done on it
for several months:
https://salsa.debian.org/freexian-team/project-funding/-/issues/19

However, it seems like there are rather serious blocking issues that
have halted progress.

Regards,

-Roberto

--
Roberto C. Sánchez

[Anders Andersson]

Impossible, fake news. It's Java. When I still coded C and assembly in
the nineties everyone told me that Java would solve the issue of
portability forever. Write once, run anywhere! Just run it, no
worries!

[Steve Sobol]

On 2023-08-05 09:50, Roberto C. Sánchez wrote:

> However, it seems like there are rather serious blocking issues that
> have halted progress.

When I need Gradle (whether on Mac, Linux or Windows), I just download
the latest version, put it somewhere and use it. I do the same thing
with Java VMs.

Gradle 4 is beyond ancient. The Bullseye VPS I'm looking at right now is
running Gradle 8.0.2.

[Steve Sobol]

On 2023-08-05 12:12, Anders Andersson wrote:


> Impossible, fake news. It's Java. When I still coded C and assembly in
> the nineties everyone told me that Java would solve the issue of
> portability forever. Write once, run anywhere! Just run it, no
> worries!

Ahhh... I don't know what com.gradle.enterprise is, but I'm guessing
it's not in the Gradle distributions I download from gradle.org.

So, before you share any more snark about Java... I'm running Gradle 8
on at least one Debian VPS. And all I had to do was download it, untar
and put it somewhere, and ensure that I had a recent JVM on that server.

Note that I downloaded the OSS version of Gradle from gradle.org, not
Gradle Enterprise from gradle.com.

[Mark Fletcher]

Thanks, that makes interesting reading. On the surface, it's clearly _not_ a
major technical challenge to install considering how easy it is to install manually.
After my original post I discovered that IntelliJ has been installing successive
versions of it on my machine and the latest version installed Gradle 8.2 which
is the latest. So I will just use that going forward, and upgrade when I update IntelliJ.

Looks like the issue for _packaging_ Gradle is some of its dependencies. That
effort you provided a link to is / was about getting rid of some proprietary enterprise
plugin, and seems to have uncovered a dependency chain via Kotlin that slightly
bizarrely leads to a dependency on OpenJDK 8... Really? In 2023? If I am reading
the discussion right it looks like the version of Kotlin we have in Debian depends
on OpenJDK 8 and no one is stepping forward to update that. They are making
rumbling noises about dropping gradle from Debian. I like gradle and will likely
continue using it -- but since I can get it onto my machine with zero effort via
Intellij I don't seek to insist that Debian package it (and installing it manually is
easy if I had to... which I don't). So I guess the way out of this current situation
is either for gradle to be dropped from Debian or Kotlin to get an upgrade. I'd lean
towards drop it except that there is an acknowledgement that Kotlin isn't going
away and will need an upgrade at some point anyway...

Anyway, thanks, I understand the situation a little better now -- and also I have
a path forward for my own work, so I am happy now.

Mark

[Steve Sobol]

On 2023-08-26 03:18, Mark Fletcher wrote:

> continue using it -- but since I can get it onto my machine with zero
> effort via Intellij

I am a Jetbrains subscriber who uses many of their IDEs, including
IntelliJ, and if that's the way you want to go, I'm certainly not going
to tell you not to.

But if you don't need IntelliJ, it seems silly to install it just to get
Gradle.

You can download the latest OSS version of Gradle from gradle.org.

Am I missing something?

[Mark Fletcher]

Oh, yes — the fact that I never suggested for a moment that the only reason I installed IntelliJ was to get Gradle. I’ve been an IntelliJ user since about 2006/7 or so. 

What I said was that I noticed that IntelliJ was installing a version of gradle to suit it, not using the platform-level Gradle, and was regularly updating it. The point of that, if you read the thread, was that there was a suggestion earlier in the thread that the reason gradle hadn’t been upgraded in bookworm and was still on version 4 while upstream was on version 8 was that it was terribly difficult to do, due to dependencies — but clearly not, given the ease of installing it manually. 

Hope that clears that up. 

Mark