We plan to make another change to the Task DSL before we release 0.6.
At the moment the behavior that if you pass a closure to an existing
task, the closure is used for configuring the task object. If you pass
a closure to a task when creating a task, this closure is used as an
action. The reason for this behavior is that we wanted to make Gradle
behave as convenient as possible for the major use cases. If you
create a simple task like HelloWorld, you usually don't want to
configure it but want to add an action. And if you are accessing a
task provided for example by the Java plugin, you usually want to
configure it. The pay-off for this behavior, is that it can be a bit
confusing at the beginning. And it is different from the normal Gradle
behavior, which always uses closure assigned to objects for
configuring them. The use case that made us change our mind about what
is the best behavior, is when you don't create simple tasks but tasks
of a custom type (e.g. Jar). In such a case you often want to
configure the tasks when you create it (in contrast to simple tasks).
We plan therefore to change the DSL in the following way:
task hello << { <action> }
task hello { <configure> }
task myJar(type: Jar) { <configure> }
existingTask << { <action>} // equivalent to existingTask.doLast
existingTask { <configure> }
We were also thinking about using the work 'do' instead of <<. That
would be nice to read. But this is not trivial to implement in Groovy.
And the << operator is already used in Groovy for adding elements to a
list, which is something similar to adding an action to a task.
Feedback is very welcome
- Hans
--
Hans Dockter
Gradle Project lead
http://www.gradle.org
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