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Actually, I greatly dislike the advice in the error to add explicit dependencies with

dependsOn

or

mustRunAfter

as these are in 98.7 % of cases just symptom treatment. (number made up)

hi 👋 Can you share more about this bit?

The example is a plugin that generates sources in build/generated and adds the path to the main source set

Is this a plugin you control? Do you know how it's adding the sources? My guess is that it's not adding a new srcDir by mapping the generation task? E.g.

// build.gradle.kts

sourceSets {
  main {
    resources {
      // add a new resource dir that is produced by the generation task
      srcDir(myCodeGenerationTask.map { it.temporaryDir })
    }
  }
}

This way every consumer of sources automatically has the necessary task dependency.

It’s an Android SourceSet that right now receives the path like this:

sourceSets.getByName("main") {
    kotlin.srcDir("$buildDir/generated/source/api/src/main/kotlin")
}

The task that fills the directory with things is setup like this:

tasks.withType<GenerateTask>().configureEach {
    generatorName.set("kotlin")
    outputDir.set("$buildDir/generated/source/api")
    ...
}

I guess this is the culprit then, since it’s a hard-wired path and not a

DirectoryProperty

. Even more so, the plugin has the

outputDir

defined as

Property<String>

I'm pretty sure Gradle will convert a String into a file, though a DirectoryProperty would help with dev-ex. The main things are to make sure

outputDir

is marked with

@OutputDirectory

and that the generation tasks are converted to file-providers and added as SrcDirs to the Android SourceSet, so Gradle will be able to figure out the task dependencies

Luckily, it is, thanks for the help!

I darkly remember that with Android things might be a bit different and you somehow need to additionally register tasks as source generation tasks or something like that. But I might remember wrongly or it might have changed in the past. I don't do Android dev.