Alternatively, to pick up the "other project" idea you had, you could expose that source set as a separate feature variant and then consume that feature variant in the separte project where you then use the standard

application

plugin facilities.

Regarding

distZip

and

distTar

, those are coming from the

distribution

plugin, which is applied by the

application

plugin. The

application

plugin just configures its

main

distribution, but you could as well add a second distribution that you then configure accordingly if you do not go the separate-project-approach.

But it basically just configures to put the

runtimeClasspath

to

lib/

, the generated start scripts to

bin/

- or the configured exectuable dir - with filemode

0755

and everything in

src/dist

directly to the root directory.