My build.gradle.kts seems to break whenever IDEA is upgraded - what gives?

Is there some non-obvious way of getting a build.gradle.kts which doesn’t regularly break when IDEA is updated? I have a project which happens to have a non-standard source layout:

my-kotlin-library
├── build.gradle.kts
└── src
    ├── main
    │   └── MyLibrary.kt
    └── test
        └── MyLibraryTest.kt

Since I only have Kotlin sources, it makes no sense (to me) to have the more conventional layout with an inserted “kotlin” subdirectory:

my-kotlin-library
├── build.gradle.kts
└── src
    ├── main
    │   └── kotlin
    │       └── MyLibrary.kt
    └── test
        └── kotlin
            └── MyLibraryTest.kt

Anyway, my unconventional setup was working fine, and I had a working run configuration which found and ran all my tests … after some weeks, I upgraded IDEA (to 2019.2, I think), along with the plugins I was told were outdated. After this, my tests weren’t found any more! To solve this, I had to add

sourceSets {
    main {
        java {
            srcDir("src/main")
        }
    }
    test {
        java {
            srcDir("src/test")
        }
    }
}

to my build.gradle.kts, and my tests were found again! I’ve no idea why it worked without the sourceSets definitions before, but suddenly needed them after the upgrade. Never mind. All was OK for a while … but I’ve just upgraded to IDEA 2019.3, and now it tells me the sourceSets is an unresolved reference! To remove this error, I unaccountably had to insert the<JavaPluginConvention>. as a prefix to sourceSets - not sure why that wasn’t needed before. Also, I had to change main"main" and test"test" inside the sourceSets definition. With those changes in place, the project appears to build, but the tests aren’t found, again!

Link to working build.gradle.kts before the IDEA upgrade

Is there something basically wrong with my build.gradle.kts which causes this constant breakage, or is yak-shaving in this area common? Any help gratefully received.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip

For the latter question (ide upgrades breaking stuff), that seems to be a cache issue. Cleaning the gradle cache may solve it. For your first one, the code in the main directory should never have worked without specifying folders in the source sets. In any case, for these issues, first make sure that it works correctly for gradle outside of Intellij so you can isolate gradle issues from gradle plugin for intellij issues (note that there is also an android gradle plugin for intellij that gets triggered for any project that includes the android plugin in any module that does not work the same way that the normal gradle plugin does).