[a-dub]

oh i have no problem at all installing stuff in my own environments, i'm all about having cool new tooling -- it just starts to get a little rude to ask others to do so in order to use something you're distributing (and therefore absent coreutils-ii-electric-boogaloo installed everywhere, i'm much more likely to reach for make, unfortunately).

[xelamonster]

Maybe it's different kinds of projects then. For most of what I work with distribution would have nothing to do with the build system in the repo, only people who would ever have to deal with it are other contributors that likely have some environment setup to do regardless.

[Jach]

Meanwhile gradle people are like: just run these included gradlew or gradlew.bat files, they'll download the actual gradle from somewhere online, pollute some folders in your home dir, and then execute the build stuff.

I notice just has some pre-built binaries that could be used for the same thing. I find it a little beyond rude what gradle normalized, but hey, it "works", and it removes the source of friction that's present any time you violate the principle of least surprise with your choice of build tool.

[PhilipRoman]

The reason why Gradle needs this junk in the first place is that they aggressively change and deprecate APIs. Tried to build a 6 year old project today and of course nothing works. Gradle wrapper proved pretty useful here. Make, on the other hand, has maintained almost perfect compatibility since it's inception.

[ptx]

I don't understand why Gradle doesn't just provide the wrapper for download. They do provide the checksums [0], so it's not like the wrapper is customized for each repo or anything, but to download it you have to download the full distribution, extract the archive to extract the archive to extract the archive and run Gradle to run Gradle.

The properties file specifying the version and checksum is great, but we shouldn't need millions of identical copies of the binary itself checked into every repo.

[0] https://services.gradle.org/distributions/

[xelamonster]

I have more than once considered writing a Makefile shim that would check for just, install if needed and proxy all commands to it...

[arjvik]

Do it!