Why no package manager for Kotlin (or java)?

Language Design
19

Why I don’t like Gradle.

  1. brew install gradle - it installs openjdk as a dependency, even though I already had HotSpot JDK installed, but ok, whatever.

  2. gradle init - and my project is polluted with garbage - gradle.build (ok that one is expected) and also - gradlew, gradlew.bat, gradle/wrapper, config.something.gradle, properties.gradle, .gitattributes. WTF is that? Tiny build utility the whole point of which is to sit somewhere in background and don’t interrupt me - that utility with the very first step - init - put tons of garbage in my project, and not in some dark corner of the project in hidden directory, but at the very top?!

  3. Ok, I manually removed all that garbage, leaving only gradle.build, trying gradle run from the console - all good.

  4. Time to connect with Intelij IDEA, creating/importing project. IDEA slowly thinking for a minute, then - regenerates all that gradle garbage again. All the gradle files I manually deleted - are now again in the project. IDEA re-generates that gradle garbage every time I manually delete it.

  5. Ok after asking - some people told me that I need to change setting in IDEA so it will take gradle from predefined location. I changed - and it worked, for couple of minutes, until I updated gradle.build - and suddenly it became red in IDEA, all sorts of errors (still works fine from console).

So I’m using old Maven, it’s also bad, but not as bad as Gradle.

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