[mdaniel]

> Until you need to fix a 3 year old build that has some insane wizardry going on.

My experience with Gradle is that it's the "3 year old build" that is almost certainly a death knell more than the insane wizardry part. My experience:

  git clone .../ancient-codebase.git
  cd ancient-codebase
  ./gradlew  # <-- oh, the wrapper, so it will download the version it wants, hazzah!
  for _ in $(seq 1 infinity); do echo gradle vomit you have to sift through; done
  echo 'BUILD FAILED' >&2
  exit 1

Contrast that with https://github.com/apache/maven-app-engine (just to pick on something sorted by earliest push date, some 10 years ago):

    $ git clone https://github.com/apache/maven-app-engine.git
    $ cd maven-app-engine
    $ mvn -B compile
    [INFO] -------------------------------------------------------------
    [ERROR] COMPILATION ERROR :
    [INFO] -------------------------------------------------------------
    [ERROR] error: Source option 6 is no longer supported. Use 8 or later.
    [ERROR] error: Target option 6 is no longer supported. Use 8 or later.
    [INFO] 2 errors
    
    $ echo "Java gonna Java"
    $ git grep -n source.*6
    pom.xml:133:            <source>1.6</source>
    $ sed -i.bak -e 's/1.6/1.8/g' pom.xml
    $ mvn -B compile
    [INFO] BUILD SUCCESS

[brabel]

I dislike Gradle as much as you probably do, but between Maven and Gradle, the one that "vomits" stuff on the command line is definitely Maven. Gradle errs by going too far to the other end: it just doesn't log anything at all, even the tasks that are actually being run (vs skipped... do you know how to get Gradle to show them?? It's `gradle --console=plain`, so obvious!! Why would anyone complain about that, right?!) or the print outs you add to the build to try to understand what the heck is going on.