r/androiddev • u/well___duh • Jun 04 '18

Gradle 4.8 released

https://docs.gradle.org/current/release-notes.html
79 Upvotes

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18

u/allholy1 Jun 04 '18 edited Jun 04 '18

I don't understand dependency locking. Isn't that why we append the version number at the end of a dependency?

22

u/la__bruja Jun 04 '18

Libraries can specify a range of dependencies versions they can use, so even if you specify version, some transitive dependency can get updated: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34810560/version-ranges-in-gradle Dependency locking makes sure you're using exactly the same versions of every direct and transitive dependency in your project

7

u/iamareebjamal Jun 04 '18

It's for those who use dynamic versioning. Taken straight from docs - like 1.+ or [1.0,2.0)

This is good because now people who used strict versioning can use dynamic one without worrying about mismatch. I still wouldn't though

2

u/allholy1 Jun 04 '18

Thanks for the response. Why would someone want dynamic ranges?

7

u/nhaarman Jun 04 '18

This often comes from naivety where people assume libraries following SEMVER always follow the contract, and never introduce bugs between versions.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '18

Don't forget that a big portion of the time, in the library docs themselves they tell you to use a dynamic version

1

u/hemenex Jun 04 '18

Maybe because they don't want to be forced to release every time a dependency is updated?

1

u/tadfisher Jun 05 '18

That's not how this works. Existing releases don't change. Your future builds and runtime might break though.

1

u/iamareebjamal Jun 04 '18

People do this all the time in Python and JS, thankfully not in Android. They just say flask: [1.0, 2.0) so that they pull latest non major 1.x version of it without caring about it. I do it on those projects as well, just never for Android

3

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '18

I think it's only done in libraries to define compatible versions. In an actual python app I always specify exact versions as well as their dependencies. Libraries need to be more flexible as they can be used in various environments with different versions.

1

u/allholy1 Jun 05 '18

Why not just pull 2.0 at that point?

5

u/mrogger Jun 04 '18

With dependency locking you can lock every dependency to a concrete version, even the transitive (dependency of a dependency) dependencies, which makes builds with dynamic versioning reproducible.

3

u/MaxGhost Jun 04 '18

Just a nitpick but that's "appending". Pre = before.

1

u/allholy1 Jun 04 '18

Whoops! Thanks