For better or worse, in the past gradle revealed the junit jar file onto the
classpath for compileTestJava. The classloader isolation now makes sure that
doesn't happen.
Now in order to compile Junit tests, some instance of junit jar file needs to
be found in a separate repository. It would be very nice to have some way of
saying useJUnit(['embeddedGradleLibs' : 'true']) or something to that effect
saying that you'd like to use the version of JUnit that ships with gradle and
will be used at runtime.
Obviously there are cases where you want to have some fixed version of
JUnit/TestNG, but it used to be so convenient to have small standalone projects
that didn't need to define any repositories to be able to run the test cases.
gradle is essentially a local repository of very valuable jar files, but there
is no easy convention to expose it as such. It would be great to say that I
have a dependency upon jetty-6.1.25.jar or slf4j-api-1.6.1.jar and pull it out
of gradle directly (when I want to of course - which is different from when
things like that were unintentionally placed along the classpath).
Maybe like mavenCentral() there would be a gradleLocal() or gradleEmbedded()
repository that would resolve artifact names according to the standard maven
conventions. This would be orthogonal to the auto-testing wiring mentioned
above, but both are attempts at re-using existing jars that are currently
cumbersome to utilize.
Thoughts?
-Spencer
