buildDir is not lazily evaluated for determining the generated files base directory

[simon-spinner]

If I change the buildDir in a gradle project to a non-default location, the plugin (in version 0.9.2) does not consider the changed buildDir for the output directory of the generated source code if it has already been initialized. Workaround is to initialize the plugin after changing the buildDir using apply:

buildDir = ....
apply(plugin = "com.google.protobuf")

The plugin should be able to lazily detect changes to the buildDir so that I can declare it in the plugins block the usual way.

[rougsig]

Hello, could you please provide an example project? Or full reproducible gradle configuration file?

[ejona86]

Unfortunately, for IDE support, I don't think we can delay initialization of the build directory. There's some ways to fix it today, but they'd go away shortly as we rework the IDE support to not require adding old plugins like idea.

I don't think this was regressed when I emulated generatedFilesBaseDir. The extension has been eagerly grabbing the buildDir for a while now, I think.

[simon-spinner]

In our setup the build output directories are outside of the source tree. That's why we change the buildDir property in the gradle project. However, we have some eclipse users and we had to manually configure the eclipse plugin to pick up the generated sources as source folders. As it was hard to get Eclipse to work with source folders outside of the workspace, we set the generatedFilesBaseDir property to a location inside the source tree.

When switching to version 0.9.2, the build output directories inside the source tree would suddenly show up containing the protobuf generated sources (conflicting with another build system we use). The emulated generatedFilesBaseDir thus doesn't have the effect anymore we relied on so far. This is not a show-stopper, as in the meantime you included eclipse support allowing us to remove the generatedFilesBaseDir setting and our customized eclipse plugin setttings. So far that seems to work good. It just took quite some time to figure out how to get the rid of the build directories in the source tree.

[ejona86]

Ah, yeah, that sounds "fun."

We are creating the directories for IDEs today in afterEvaluate{}, and it seems we are going to be forced to do that long-term. So we can tweak some things to be able to see changes to buildDir. It think the idea would be to change defaultGeneratedFilesBaseDir to be a GString or provider.

But that would retain a reference to project, so we'll need to swap to layout.getBuildDirectory()... which looks okay. I thought there was a missing API relating to DirectoryProperty in an older version of Gradle we support, but it doesn't appear to be the ones needed here.

[ejona86]

With my other fix, things are probably working if you are careful. But I think it depends on when tasks are configured. We should swap some other buildDir usages over to using the provider as well.

[Deepanshu9376]

Is this issue still open, if yes i would like to contribute, please assign this to me.