[gradle-user] dependency excludes in buildscript

[Brett Cave]

I am trying to use the tomcat plugin with gradle. we have customized our
tomcat libraries to include versions of jasper-el / el-api that support
parameters, so the default 6.0.29 versions have been removed and
tomcat-jasper-el and tomcat-el-api 7.0.4 have been added to allow EL
statements like "#{myBean.test('param')}".

In order to bootstrap the libraries for the tomcat plugin startup, I use the
following configuration, based on the README. The problem is that the
buildscript resolves dependencies (specifically of jasper-6.0.29) and ends
up with el-api and jasper-el 6.0.29 on the classpath, and so I get an error
of:

com.sun.el.parser.ParseException: Encountered "(" at line 1, column 14

Here is a part of the gradle script:

buildscript {
    repositories {
        mavenRepo name: 'repo_bootstrap', urls: "
http://artifactory.local/repo";
    }

    configurations {
        classpath.exclude module: 'el-api'
        classpath.exclude module: 'jasper-el'
    }

    dependencies {
        def tomcatVersion = '6.0.29'
        def tomcatElVersion = '7.0.4'
        def mysqlVersion = '5.1.13'

        classpath "org.apache.tomcat:catalina:${tomcatVersion}",
                "org.apache.tomcat:coyote:${tomcatVersion}",
                "org.apache.tomcat:jasper:${tomcatVersion}",
                "org.apache.tomcat:tomcat-el-api:${tomcatElVersion}",
                "org.apache.tomcat:tomcat-jasper-el:${tomcatElVersion}",
                "mysql:mysql-connector-java:${mysqlVersion}",
                "gradle-tomcat-plugin:gradle-tomcat-plugin:0.3"
    }
}


If I run in debug mode, I see that jasper is pulling in el-api and jasper-el
version 6.0.29, how would I go about configuring the classpath correctly? I
have tried adding the following to the build script, in order to pull
jasper-6.0.29 later (and remove it from the buildscript section above):

configuration {
   warPath { extendsFrom runtime }
   warPath.exclude module: 'el-api'
   warPath.exclude module: 'jasper-el'
}

dependencies {
   warPath "org.apache.tomcat:jasper:6.0.29"
}

tomcatRun {
    classpath = classpath + configurations.warPath
}

When I try run tomcatRun from that, I get a parse error in application
web.xml, and application is not deployed to the container.

I know i'm probably overlooking some basic principle in setting up the
classpath for tomcat in gradle, but can't figure out where i'm going wrong
and how to do it correctly.