IssueTracker

We are currently using AGP internal task types to flag memory-intensive tasks to enforce a reduced parallelism at execution time. I've raised this separately (with a lot more detail) as a feature request (https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/224584845). However, I'm mentioning it here as our ability to implement this will be reduced or possibly eliminated by what is described int he roadmap.

Thanks #comment2 that's helpful context. I've marked that FR as blocking this and triaged it to the right component

Another use case that we have is to reactively respond to the creation of APKs and AABs. The new AGP APIs allow us to connect out tasks into the artifact pipeline via wiredWith but the best we can come up with to receive the completed artifact is to wire in toTransform. This A) does not guarantee that we will receive the final artifact as more transforms may be applied after our task is called, and B) requires us to copy the input property file/dir to our tasks output property file/dir in order to not break the build cache.

The reactive behavior of the above is the complicating factor.

A non-reactive approach could simply depend upon the task name and then look for a hardcoded path in the build directory (which is still sort of gross, since the build output paths are not documented as public API and change from time to time).

Another approach would be to wire a custom task to consume the output of the build via the built artifacts loader feeding an input property. However, this approach cannot be applied reactively. Either the custom task is included in the build and causes the creation of the binary artifact, or it is not included in the build and never gets invoked.

Re #comment4 - For artifacts exposed in the api, you should be able to just call get (example). That will always be the final artifact after all transformations

We didn't provide a task wiring helper for that case as there's only one thing to wire, but I can see how the inconsistency can be misleading

WRT #comment5, that is the scenario I was attempting to document in the last approach. The problem with that is that since the task input is set to the variant.artifacts.get(SingleArtifact.APK)), if the task is included in the build it will cause the creation of the artifact. Our build is currently defined to reactively perform some actions (predominantly some fancy reporting) only if work is actually performed.

We had previously been pushing our build to wire in to task outputs by locating tasks by type and referencing output properties as inputs to tasks registered via task finalizes or dependsOn relationships. This started getting more and more fragile as the AGP APIs migration proceeded/matured. I'm to the point now where I think the notion of reactive execution is hostile to the direction/expectations of both Gradle and AGP and want to start moving away from it, yet our build as it currently stands does rely on this behavior.

I bring up this up as a gap only because I don't know if I'll be able to completely refactor our CI pipeline's expectations in time for Gradle 8+.

I think that's a fair request. Being able to have a task that consumes an artifact but finalize the final task that touches that artifact makes sense. We can look into this.

Note that we have changed our timeline. The old API will only be removed in 9.0. see our updated roadmap for more details.