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Comment by chapill | Hacker News Reader

>Gradle... It's an environment for programmer!

>Maven...you have to write your own plugin. Not nice.

>If I wanted to change one thing in Gradle it would be for the Gradle project to focus on debugging

You've just explained why I have no interest in Gradle. You're writing one off, undocumented, anonymous plugins, in a weird domain specific language, with debugging tools that aren't very good.

Worse, when the Gradle guru decides to leave the company for greener pastures, everyone else is left with a mess trying to figure out WTH that person was doing in all the build files.

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Yeah, especially code like that:

artifactory { publish { repository { repoKey = version.endsWith('-SNAPSHOT') ? 'libs-snapshot-local' : 'libs-release-local' } } }

In Gradle, this is immediately understandable to everybody. You can't do this in Maven without plugin support or some very protracted constructs.

Sprinkling those small bits makes the Gradle useful. We are not talking about making a beast of a build system, just provide you with an ability to solve your problems.

You may not want or like to learn another tool and that's fine. But don't think that just because you don't see the reason it means its not useful for other people.

You're now contradicting yourself:

>I really find it difficult to figure out why things fail even though I have almost 20 years of experience

>In Gradle, this is immediately understandable to everybody

You pulled an easy example to defend Gradle for the exact problem you just complained about.

>You may not want or like to learn another tool and that's fine.

It's not about like or want, it's about having the wisdom to recognize a poor solution before investing time in adopting it. OP fell for the hype. Maven works fine for me, thanks.

This sounds like a process problem, not a gradle problem. I don't think there's inherent readability to maven, and I'd love to share my previous employer's pom files with you.

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