Cedric had some issues with out mailing list, so I'm posting this on his behalf:
------------------ Hello Gradle users, As some of you know, I recently tried to convert my build (http://testng.org) to Gradle but I didn't make much progress after a few hours, despite reading all the docs and mailing-list messages I could find, so I thought I'd share my experience here. First of all, I have to say that I'm very impressed with the effort that went into the user guide. The doc looks very professional and thorough, and I especially like the "one big web page" format (I did the exact same thing with TestNG and users absolutely love the fact they can do a search in the entire documentation so quickly or that they can print it and take it home with them). Having said that, I think this particular document is not a good introduction for a couple of reasons: * It doesn't emphasize migration. I'm guessing most people who will come across this document will want to convert an existing build (most likely ant and sometimes Maven) to Gradle. This should be the first chapter. * It's not high level enough. I've read the whole document maybe one and half times now and I'm still not sure what the concepts and building blocks are, what the difference between a module an a dependency is, what names are reserved, which ones are examples, etc... I don't want to migrate my build by doing copy/pastes that I don't understand, because this guarantees that in a few months from now, I still won't understand how my build works, much less how to modify it. I will only switch to a new build system if I can completely understand how it works, philosophically and technically. TestNG's build is pretty straightforward (although interestingly, Maven can't achieve it, I can go into details if you're curious) and the two things that I needed to get started are: * How do I change the default source directories? * How do I configure my classpath to point to local jar files? I ended up reading about variables called srcDirNames or something such, none of which are mentioned in that doc anywhere. I still wasn't able to get these variables to work properly, by the way, so I'm still in the dark as to how to do this. And I still don't know how to add local jar files to my compile and runtime classpath. I'm guessing this involves specifying artifacts with some file:/// tricks or something like that, but I couldn't find any example anywhere (not just in your doc, I really mean anywhere in my web searches). My ant build has been working flawlessly for years and I'm very happy with it but I'm also always trying to streamline things and I think Gradle has the power to trim down my build files considerably, so I'd really like to get this working and see if I would be happy with the final result. Thanks for reading :-)
