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I think it should behave as you exepct. It should only be evaluated and thus the file read when needed. But it is read each time the provider is evaluated. If you don't see where the

collection

is queried, so that the provider gets evaluated, mabye set a breakpoint within your

map

and try to find out.

I did do a check, and I'm just chalking it up to using an older version of Gradle where

addAllLater()

seems to eagerly evaluate providers for whatever reason.

Hm, maybe this is related: https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/23904

It is true that replacing

RegularFileProperty

with

ConfigurableFileCollection

(and working on its elements) seems to work fine.