Packaging a gradle application

Packaging a gradle application

[Noé Lopez via Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution.]

Hi Guix,

Today I thought I'd try to package Mindustry, a libre game I like made
in Java. It uses the gradle build system, and I couldn't find any
trace of gradle in the guix sources or mailing lists.

I only found some gradle packages being built with the ant-build-sytem,
so I tried that for a few hours but I can only get so far as Mindustry
uses some very specific gradle settings that I don't really know how to
replicate with the ant build system, because it is not very flexible.

Is there something stopping us from using gradle to build packages or
has it just not been done before ?

Thanks in advance
Noé Lopez

Re: Packaging a gradle application

[David Elsing]

Hi,

Noé Lopez via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution."
<guix-devel@gnu.org> writes:

> Today I thought I'd try to package Mindustry, a libre game I like made
> in Java. It uses the gradle build system, and I couldn't find any
> trace of gradle in the guix sources or mailing lists.
> [...]
> Is there something stopping us from using gradle to build packages or
> has it just not been done before ?

Gradle is very hard to bootstrap from source [1,2] and upstream does not
have plans to change that [3]. This is also why only a very old version
is packaged in Debian [4,5]. I don't know whether anyone is working on
it, that is just why I had read.

> Thanks in advance
> Noé Lopez

Cheers,
David

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2019-07/msg00402.html
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-java/2022/08/msg00010.html
[3] https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/26516
[4] https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=gradle
[5] https://salsa.debian.org/java-team/kotlin/-/issues/15