This message was deleted.

Au contraire, I think JetPack is exactly the problem. JetPack is broken by design for "normal" publishing and should imho never be used for such a use-case. It should at most be used for ad-hoc testing specific commits or branches and even then there are often preferable options. Besides that it is broken by design, it is slow, might fool the build tool, and unreliable. It behaves even worse in case of multi-project builds. And besides that, it also manipulates the generated Metadata after it was generated, and often does it in a bad way, especially with Gradle Module Metadata. As you can see, it replaced the coordinates of the main artifact, but not the ones for additional variants like the test fixtures and thereby breaks the whole metadata.

Oh. Guess I should finally move to Maven Central then

Definitely. 🙂 Setting this up is just a one-time half-pain for the long-time win and convenience of your users. 🙂

Wow, I didn't expect that from GitHub

It is a blessing that they forced authentication. Otherwise we'd see in the Java world an explosion of private repos, typo squatting and such. This would be terrible for security (and performance of resolution, and reproducibility, etc.). Publishing to Central isn't that hard. A bit of administrative work in the beginning, but then you're done.