Re: gradle not supported?

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Jesse,

> I noticed when I search the code for gradle I get
> - code deleting the provided gradle jar
> - comments about keeping a version of two different packages back
>   because they require gradle. 
>
> I'm guessing the gradle jar is deleted because it isn't compiled for
> guix. But why are these packages (java-htsjdk and java-picard in
> gnu/packages/bioinformatics.scm) held back to not depend on gradle?

That’s because we can’t build packages that depend on gradle without
depending on an opaque binary that we cannot (yet) build.

> If I need a package that uses gradlew to build, what is the best
> solution for defining it?

IIUC gradle usually downloads a version of gradle as the first step.
Building a package that uses gradlew may currently require a lot of
manual work to essentially avoid the use of gradle as we have no gradle
build system yet.

A more constructive way would be to figure out a way to provide a
gradle-build-system that works around the problems we have with gradle
in one way or another, so that this is fixed for all future packages
depending on gradle.

Tricky.

-- 
Ricardo