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You very much can debug Gradle. It's just like any other Java/Groovy application. You set a breakpoint in the build file or some Gradle source file and you attach a debugger. In this respect, it's probably more debug-friendly than, say Makefiles where all you can do is add some print statements or go through megabytes of debug output.

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Adding to that, in IntelliJ it's as simple as running the task from the 'run Gradle task' window (not sure how it's called) with Shift pressed. All the breakpoints in the build scripts will now work.

If you also use wrapper with sources (`-all` instead of `-bin` suffix in the `gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties`) you can step into the entire Gradle source code as well

In over 30 years of programming, I have never had to debug a makefile. I think I would just retire if I ever had to.

Sometimes builds are complex. You have several deployment paths, platforms, modules, features, signing and what not. Then the build is akin to a small program. That’s still reasonable. The problem is that all build tools that allow this make it more complex than simply writing a small script that does exactly what you need. Add to that that some dependemcies use a different build tool that you use. Adding a cmake dependency to a make project makes everything even more complex.

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